But is that why listeners tune in week after week? I suspect not. What they want is to hear Keillor’s self-consciously cheesy skits—Guy Noir and the American Duct Tape Council and the old-school radio special-effects gags. And, of course, they want to hear Keillor’s soothing, mellow relation of that week’s news from the fictional Lake Wobegon. What Keillor is offering listeners is a set of comfy, musty, fusty, and dusty Midwestern roots: “The little town that time forgot, and the decades cannot improve.” It’s a place the listeners probably didn’t come from—these are coastal NPR elites, after all—and that never existed anyway, which is the attraction: familiar enough to soothe, fictional enough to be endearing.

The Lutheran church choir director; the wistfully aging parents; the above-average children; the matronly, melancholy, good-hearted waitresses; the thick, red-velveted town theater and its majestic old Wurlitzer—it’s this idealized image of middle America that either draws listeners in, hoping for a brief respite in their Saturday night, or drives them away, rolling their eyes at the cornball shtick. Peter Ostroushko is a great musician, but it’s unlikely 4 million listeners a week are tuning in to hear him play folk standards.

So the question is whether they’ll tune in to hear Thile do it. In some ways, Thile is a natural choice. Like Keillor, he’s a consummate showman with a flair for the whimsical, though his sensibility may skew closer to the twee than the corny. He loves roots music and has cred with musicians. He’s already a ubiquitous presence on public radio. But the Californian doesn’t have much of a claim on the Midwest, and it seems much of his success will hinge on his ability as a raconteur. Although Keillor says the news from Lake Wobegon will go the way of so many small-town news outlets and vanish, some fancy Keillor as a modern-day Mark Twain, and storytelling is a fundamental element of the show.

Even if Thile is a good fit for A Prairie Home Companion, A Prairie Home Companion is a curious fit for Thile. At 34, he’s less than half Keillor’s age and has a busy musical career. He has frequent gigs with Punch Brothers, your snobby bluegrass-fan friend’s answer to Mumford and Sons. Nickel Creek, the band he co-founded at 8, recently reunited after a hiatus. He’s a sought-after instrumentalist for other musicians and collaborates with symphonies and classical musicians like Edgar Meyer and Yo-Yo Ma. In 2012, he won a MacArthur Genius grant. Thile isn’t a lazy revivalist or formulaic pop-confectioneer—though he’s an earnest young man, his mandolin playing is truly astonishing, and Punch Brothers strives for musical innovation. A typical set might include a few bluegrass standards, a passel of originals, a dash of Debussy, and one of the all-acoustic Radiohead covers that have made the group Internet celebrities:

What will Thile have to sacrifice to take on the show, and how long will he do it? Having been a national star before he was even in his teens, Thile may be aging more quickly than the rest of us, but he still seems too young and ambitious for the velvet handcuffs of a weekly radio show that’s had a single host for the past four decades.