Intergenerational connectivity. It’s a key component for what drives I’m With Her, the three-person outfit made up of Sara Watkins (Nickel Creek), Aoife O’Donovan (Crooked Still) and Texas singer/writer Sarah Jarosz.
The trio is currently on the road promoting their sophomore bow, Wild and Clear and Blue, the follow-up to their 2018 Ethan Johns-produced debut, See You Around. While Watkins admits the first record was “very bare, written in about a week and a half and had material we performed basically as they were written,” the new collection of songs found the longtime friends adding more complexity to the process with help from multi-instrumentalist/producer Josh Kaufman, who is also a member of the collaborative ensemble Bonny Light Horseman.
“From the outset, we wanted to be open to playing with other people on this album,” Watkins said in a recent interview. “And we weren’t sure if that meant doing a full production on all the songs or if that would mean less than that. We ended up feeling like these songs were totally full and complete as we wrote them with just the three of us in a room. But we also wanted to have support on some songs.”
The auditory manna on this collection of songs runs deep. Highlights range from the soaring “Mother Eagle (Sing Me Alive),” which glistens with the group’s harmonies intertwining with Jarosz’s ringing octave mandolin and Watkins’ mournful fiddle runs, to the joyful melancholy of the glistening opener “Ancient Light,” to “Standing On the Fault Line,” a solemn meditation that speaks of choosing between sticking with a dream or moving on when expectations don’t work out. The arrangements that build from a solitary guitar to a hypnotic crescendo of dreamy vocals make it worth the price of admission.
Ask Watkins about the key to this kind of organic intimacy that goes far beyond the fact that the three members have relationships dating back years, and she says it hinges on the collective decision to hunker down and live with each song during the creative process. It’s on full display in the video snippets interspersed on the clips from the album posted on YouTube.
“It was a really enjoyable record to make all in all,” Watkins said. “We were all isolated in upstate New York in both studios [Rhinebeck’s The Clubhouse and The Outlier Inn in the Catskills]. That was good for us, to be out on our own and to be in our own little world. We’d get a bunch of groceries, do meals together and be in the same rhythm while making this thing out of our shared experiences and our collaborative songwriting process. It’s a beautiful thing to get to work with people you love and respect and that challenge you. It’s kind of magic. That’s how we like to do it versus having our work hours and then going our separate ways.”
While recording Wild and Clear and Blue in two separate chunks—in April and July of 2024—the passing of John Prine and Nanci Griffith, who both died during the pandemic, provided an inspirational spark while the album was being written.
Having already accrued plenty of mileage touring for a year and a half behind the first album—not to mention the years prior when all three musicians shared stages at different festivals and gigs—I’m With Her are raring to further share their creative chemistry with the world.
“We’re very excited to be out there. It’s going to be the three of us on stage, and it’s been really neat to see how the two records work together,” Watkins said. “Putting the material together kind of shines a light and creates a different picture because we have more songs to relate to each other.
“It’s just a bigger picture because of the context of the many years that we know each other and the writing that has happened,” she added. “We are delighted to be getting out there and playing shows almost all year.”
I’m With Her performs at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass at Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, on Oct. 5 at 2:10pm. hardlystrictlybluegrass.com
