I'm With Her: An Americana Supergroup at the Height of Its Powers

Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O'Donovan and Sarah Watkins, each a star in her own right,are releasing their second album and first in seven years. It deeply reflects this anxious moment in our collective lives.

Sarah Watkins, Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O’Donovan (l to r) are entering their second decade as one of acoustic music’s essential ensembles.

If Wild and Clear and Blue, due out on May 9, is only I’m With Her’s second album since 2018, an eon in rock & roll time, it’s because the members have been busy: cutting solo records, winning Grammys, playing to ever-larger gatherings across America and across the world. Negotiating life in the time of the pandemic. Starting this week, I’m With Her will be touring behind Wild and Clear and Blue through November, when they’re scheduled to close the tour at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium.

There are two essential components to Wild and Clear and Blue. The first is the album’s message: the urgent need that the group’s members—Sarah Jarosz, Aoife (that’s EEE-fa) O’Donovan and Sarah Watkins—feel to connect with something larger than their individual selves: the past, each other, their childhoods, their families, the women of the world, the musical traditions in which I’m With Her’s sound is rooted, and, of course, their audience.

The second component is the music itself. As on their debut album, 2018’s See You Around, the new album’s 11 songs are collectively written. “When we write together,” says O’Donovan, “it’s almost as if we’re a three-headed creature. There’s never any need to take ownership of ideas, and always an ease of letting go when something isn’t working.” “There’s very little head-butting,” Jarosz agrees. If asked who came up with a particular melody or lick, a member may well respond, “I really couldn’t say.”

The group first sang together in an informal jam at 2014’s Telluride Bluegrass Festival, and “all three women were immediately struck by the easy chemistry among them,” The New York Times reported. Despite their busy solo careers and geographical dispersion—Watkins lives in Los Angeles, Jarosz in Nashville, and O’Donovan in Orlando, Florida—the decision to form a band came as easily as that musical chemistry. (Life hasn’t gotten any simpler since: in 2017, both O’Donovan and Watkins bore children, and Jarosz got married in 2023.)

Each woman has a career that can without exaggeration be called stellar. Jarosz, 33, has recorded seven solo albums and won four Grammys, one with I’m With Her for the 2019 single, “Call My Name.” A mandolin prodigy who frequented bluegrass festivals at age nine, Jarosz has since mastered the octave mandolin. Bigger than a standard mandolin and with a lower range, the instrument has become Jarosz’s axe of choice; she calls it her “soul mate.” She plays agile clawhammer banjo as well, and acoustic and electric guitar. Her mezzo-soprano is slightly lower than her bandmates’ voices and bears traces of a southern accent; Jarosz grew up in tiny Wimberley, Texas. Like O’Donovan, she’s a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music.

O’Donovan, 42, is a guitarist and occasional pianist. She has released six solo albums, four solo EPs, and nine albums with the groups Crooked Still and Sometymes Why. Her many solo outings notwithstanding, O’Donovan considers herself “a band person, someone you can call to be in your band or play a show.”

Sarah Watkins, 43, is a fiddle virtuoso who is not unknown to pick up a ukelele—her cover of The Stone Poneys’ “Different Drum,” accompanying herself on the uke, is worth tracking down on YouTube. Watkins has released four solo albums and four with Nickel Creek, the neo-bluegrass trio whose best-known member, mandolinist/singer Chris Thile, long ago achieved a stardom that reaches well beyond bluegrass. The Watkins Family Hour, a loose aggregation anchored by Watkins and her brother Sean, the third Nickel Creek alumnus, has put out three albums. Sarah Watkins’s voice is paradoxical. Essentially soft and tender, at high volumes it turns raw, rough-edged. It’s in the latter moments that Watkins the vocalist possesses a visceral power.

If I were to guess when the songs on Wild and Clear and Blue were written, it seems likely that it was during and shortly after the pandemic—that is, between mid-2020 and today. The acceleration of climate change plays a role, too, in intensifying the anxiety that recurs throughout the album. Handling the lead vocal on the first song, “Ancient Light,” Jarosz sings about being surrounded by darkness, gathering dry leaves to start a fire: “While everything’s unraveling/I’m building a fire/When it catches/I’ll be swimming in the ancient light.” The narrator’s longing to connect with the past, especially the musical past, is palpable.

This video, whether or not it was shot during the actual recording of “Ancient Light,” captures the group members’ joy at bringing something new into the world. The balding, gray-bearded fellow popping in and out is Wild and Clear and Blue’s producer, Josh Kaufman.

The album’s title song is, to my mind, the best-written, especially if you’re aware of its backstory. Fact #1: When O’Donovan was nine, her mother took her to a Nanci Griffith concert, a memory which stayed with O’Donovan permanently. Fact #2: One of Covid’s early victims was the great singer/songwriter John Prine, whose song “Paradise,” from Prine’s first, 1971, album, is one of his best-loved, about a Kentucky town that was strip-mined into nonexistence. By the time Prine wrote the song, Paradise was gone, erased. But Big Industry’s relentless devastation of the American landscape, as infuriating as it is, is not why I’m With Her wrote the song. “Wild and Clear and Blue” is a memory song, about how musical memories nourish us for life.

“Wild and Clear and Blue”’s chorus is sung twice: identically, except for one tiny alteration. “Oooh when I was nine,” sings O’Donovan, “Heard you singing ‘bout the five and dime”—that would be a reference to Nanci Griffith’s 1986 ballad, “Love At the Five and Dime,” an essential song in the shaping of Americana music. O’Donovan sings further: “What’s that I asked/And my mama said/They were everywhere when I was a kid/I hear the fiddle and bow/Still playing long after the show/Your voice runs like the Brazos [River] through me/Wild and clear and blue.” The second time around, the chorus is worded a tiny bit differently, O’Donovan singing, “Ooh, when I was nine/Heard you singing ‘bout paradise.” The reference is to Prine’s song about his childhood (“Daddy, won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County?/Down by the Green River where Paradise lay”). Prine’s song has outlived him, and will probably outlive us. But “Wild and Clear and Blue” takes a sobering, even alarming, turn in its last two lines: “Now the static is slowly replacing/The sounds of my childhood days.” We live in the world of AI now, whose glut of information is crowding out childhood memories, erasing those nourishing links to our past.

On Wild and Clear and Blue, the group has enlarged its sonic palette. On the first album, the only musician besides the three women was their co-producer, Ethan Johns, who contributed some guitar. The new album was produced by Josh Kaufman, a member of the folk trio Bonny Light Horseman and a multi-instrumentalist whose playing is all over Wild and Clear and Blue, from synthesizers to harmonium to lap steel guitar. Drummer J.T. Bates, a sometime colleague of Kaufman’s, plays on three tracks.

Though Wild and Clear and Blue has any number of splendid moments, two resonate especially deeply with this listener. “Sisters of the Night Watch” begins with all three voices until Watkins takes over at 0:55, gently and tenderly. After a choral interlude and a guitar, or octave mandolin, solo by Jarosz, Watkins is back, alone again, at 2:50, gradually building to a raw, hoarse and uninhibited shout at 3:48. It’s a piece of singing that I hope Watkins isn’t planning to attempt at every show, or even every other show, on I’m With Her’s upcoming tour. She could do her vocal cords serious damage.

Above: Sarah Watkins risks shredding her larynx on “Sisters of the Night Watch”

The sixth song, “Mother Eagle (Sing Me Alive)” may be Wild and Clear and Blue’s high point. O’Donovan’s lead vocal gives way, at 2:46, to a trio whose tension mounts, and mounts further, individual voices breaking away from the pack to rejoin it. It’s an impressively complex vocal arrangement, which must have taken even these kindred spirits a long time to perfect.

Above: The final minute of “Mother Eagle (Sing Me Alive” is one of Wild and Clear and Blue’s high points, perhaps the highest.

“To me,” Jarosz says, “those last thirty seconds of ‘Mother Eagle’ are like a thesis statement of what this band is about: our voices weaving around each other and making the song feel so full. That is so quintessentially us.”