On July 15, Americana supergroup I’m With Her plays at Wolf Trap, where they’ll share the bill with Iron & Wine on their shared Robin’s Egg Tour. It’s the second summer in a row fiddler, vocalist, and songwriter Sara Watkins headlines the venue, having appeared last year with Nickel Creek, the progressive bluegrass band she founded with her brother Sean, and Chris Thile.
In advance of I’m With Her’s performance at Wolf Trap, I spoke with Sara about the group’s latest project and their upcoming tour.
Although Sara is just into her mid-40s, Watkins already has more than three decades of experiences as a professional musician, starting with Nickel Creek at the tender age of 8. “It was a lot of summer tours,” she said of her early years in the business. She’s since worked as a sideperson — winning the Americana Music Award for best instrumentalist in 2016 — along with various group projects, including the Watkins Family Hour, with Sean, and a series of well-received solo albums.
When they made their first album, 2018’s See You Around, Watkins was, she told me, just getting to know her partners, Aoife O’Donovan and Sarah Jarosz. (It’s a good thing Jarosz and Watkins spell their first names differently, because they share both a name and having been child prodigies.) This led, she explained, to a very simple, spare, bare bones approach, recorded live.
For the follow-up album, this year’s Wild and Clear and Blue, the band wanted a fuller, more expansive sound, so they brought in producer Josh Kaufman, who’s worked with artists ranging from the jam band world (Bob Weir) to folk-pop (Cassandra Jenkins), heartland-tinged indie rock (The Hold Steady), and his band Bonny Light Horseman.
“It would’ve been hard,” Sara said, to make another album as sparse as the first. (Even with these limitations, See You Around led to sold-out shows and a Grammy Award.) Reviews of the album have praised the increased nuance of the music and its use of sonic layers, using the artists’ shared background in folk and roots music as a jumping off point for exploration.
Watch the official music video for “Wild and Clear and Blue” by I’m With Her on YouTube:
To write the songs, the three singer-songwriters had a series of mini-retreats at AirBnBs of a few days each, allowing them to dedicate their full attention to making music together, free from the limitations of studio working hours and the distractions of everyday life. Sara praised her bandmates, saying she enjoyed how they were able to all switch freely from taking to lead to more supporting roles, which is reflected in praise for the project as being ego-free. They’ve all had long and varied musical lives, which have made them all well-rounded in terms in of the strengths they bring to the table as collaborators.
Being on the road, especially when one has been at for as long as she has and starting as young as Watkins did, can be a drag, especially when one has a family. She’s looking forward to having her daughter, who’s 7, with her for part of the time she’s out. (The tour will go through November, broken up into blocks of a few weeks at a time.)
Sara’s also looking forward to working with Iron & Wine. I mentioned how one never knows what entertaining, wild stuff is going to come out of his mouth, and she chuckled a bit and said, “People like that are rare.”
To finish our conversation, I asked Sara to name one thing each she’s been watching, reading, and listening to lately that she’d recommend. She said she hasn’t been watching much; the last thing she saw was Severance, but “everyone has seen that.” She praised Daniel Mason’s novel The North Woods. When it came to music, her daughter chimed in, saying Wicked. Sara agreed but also brought up Joni Mitchell’s career-spanning retrospective Travelogue.
The July 15 show is sure to be a rare delight, with two acts at the contemporary bleeding edge of roots music.
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I’m With Her
Iron & Wine
Wolf Trap
Wednesday, July 15
Doors @ 6:30pm
$51-$150
All ages
