I’m with her

I’m With Her began with the kind of musical accident that only works when the musicians already understand each other. Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O’Donovan had crossed paths for years, but an impromptu performance at the 2014 Telluride Bluegrass Festival turned those separate connections into a real band. They had only a short time to prepare for a late-night set at the Sheridan Opera House, rehearsing songs together before discovering how naturally their voices and instruments could fit. That origin still explains much of what I like about I’m With Her today. The trio never sounds like three successful solo artists politely taking turns. At their best, the individual personalities become almost impossible to separate, and that is where the music gets interesting.

The backgrounds of the three members help explain why the combination works so well. Sara Ullrika Watkins, born June 8, 1981, in Vista, California, grew up inside the progressive acoustic world as a founding member of Nickel Creek, where her fiddle playing and singing developed alongside Chris Thile and her brother Sean Watkins. Sarah Ellen Jarosz, born May 23, 1991, in Austin, Texas, and raised in Wimberley, became known remarkably young as a singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist with a particular command of mandolin, banjo and guitar. Aoife Maria O’Donovan was born November 18, 1982, in Massachusetts and became widely known as the lead singer of Crooked Still before building an extensive solo career. All three had already learned how to move beyond conventional bluegrass without losing the acoustic discipline behind it. In I’m With Her, that experience becomes less about virtuosity for its own sake and more about knowing when to leave space.

Three Voices, One Band

After their 2014 beginning, Watkins, Jarosz and O’Donovan toured together during 2015 and developed arrangements of both original material and songs by other writers. Those performances were important because their identity formed onstage before they committed it to a studio album. Their voices are individually easy to recognise, yet the real signature arrives when the harmonies lock together. One singer may carry the melody while the other two enter almost invisibly, or the lead can move between them without creating the feeling of a handover. I particularly enjoy the slight differences in vocal texture: Jarosz can sound clear and direct, O’Donovan often brings a softer grain and relaxed