I'm With Her Looks to the Past to Navigate the Present
The string band supergroup, featuring Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O'Donovan, and Sara Watkins, draws strength from sisterhood and ancestry.
I’m with Her - Wild and Clear and Blue
On “Year After Year,” a rousing highlight from the new I’m With Her album Wild and Clear and Blue, a group of lifelong friends commit to reconnecting with one another on an annual retreat— to keep the spark of their shared affection kindled. Though it’s a song about maintaining old bonds, it also bears the admission that relationships evolve: “Things will never be the same as they were when we were young/ Let’s welcome the change, no song unsung.”
The line offers an apt encapsulation of the album’s spirit, which is all about rummaging through the past, savoring the good gifts of the ancestors while steering clear of uncritical nostalgia. It’s not an album about living in the past, but rather about drawing from it to more boldly face the present.
Few groups are better-suited to that task than I’m With Her. Founded in 2009— their band name predating Hilary Clinton’s campaign slogan— the elite trio of Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O'Donovan, and Sara Watkins is unapologetic in their reverence of American roots music, even as they infuse their folk preservation with a more contemporary perspective. They are exemplars of what it means to be nourished by tradition without being beholden to it.
The tension between past and present plays out across Wild and Clear and Blue, just the second album they’ve released since forming, and the first since 2018’s terrific See You Around. The new one attests to broader perspective and a wiser point of view, but also to the ongoing strength of their bond— there is an easeful warmth here that suggests old friends picking up where they left off, as though no time has passed at all. The result is an album that builds on the strengths of their debut; it’s an even stronger record than the one that came before it, and one of the most satisfying American roots releases in recent memory.
At least part of that broadened perspective comes from the introduction of a new producer, Josh Kaufman— a folk savant whose previous credits include Bonny Light Horseman, Craig Finn, and a handful of rootsy Taylor Swift tracks. Kaufman knows better than to mess with a good thing, and Wild and Clear and Blue is firmly focused on the rustle of acoustic guitar strings, the dramatic swoop of Watkins’ fiddle, and the alluring harmonies of the three singers. Piano and the occasional drum kit enter just to make the album sound richer, fuller, more textured— never to distract or overwhelm.
That’s not so say there aren’t fireworks here— just that the fireworks are supplied by the three band members, who have never sounded more assured in their musical bond. The rollicking “Year After Year” builds into a barn-burning hoedown, and “Find My Way to You” is romping bluegrass. The slower numbers are more modest in their instrumental dexterity but still highlight the trio’s virtuosity as singers; the swaying “Standing on the Fault Line” is a master class in close harmony, while “Different Rocks, Different Hills” is winsome in its conversational tone.
That sense of being invited into a conversation between three long-time, intimate friends is a huge part of the I’m With Her appeal— and nowhere is it more evident than on “Wild and Clear and Blue,” an O’Donovan-led series of childhood flashbacks. It’s a song about remembering— and being shaped by— the music your parents played in the house when you were little, and it lays flowers at the feet of John Prine and Nanci Griffith, a couple of O’Donovan’s heroes. The song posits these nourishing childhood memories as a thread that runs through our lives, keeping us stitched together to a more expansive world of love, music, and belonging.
If this is the most straightforwardly nostalgic song on the album, the one that follows it complicates the narrative. With its eerie, minor-key menace, “Sisters of the Night Watch” is an outlier in the I’m With Her songbook, dark and chilling where most of their music is warm and welcoming. Here, Watkins relinquishes the faith she was raised with, but still longs for some sense of connection to something bigger than herself— a non-denominational bond with other women who have been spiritual wanderers and seekers.
It’s a song that conveys the spirit of the album in more ways than one. In the way it chronicles deconstruction while also treasuring continuity and connection, it embodies the album’s balance of rootedness and restlessness. And, it highlights the group’s ability to explore new tones and colors without ever straying from their central string band conceit. (Here and throughout the album, Watkins proves herself to be the group’s most volatile element— not only through her eruptive wails, which pierce the band’s easygoing tranquility, but also through her soaring fiddle work, which carries so much of the album’s melodic energy.)
“Only Daughter”— a Jarosz-led album highlight— tackles some of the same themes from a different vantage point. Here, the singer finds it futile wishing for some future miracle, and instead longs to once again feel loved and protected by her mom. “Different Rocks, Different Hills” similarly attests to the need to offer and receive friendship— as a low-key anthem about shouldering one another’s burdens, it’s immediately one of the group’s signature songs.
More than once, Wild and Clear and Blue taps into a sense of the ancient, grounding these intimate sketches in a much broader human context— the group basks in the “Ancient Light” on the album’s opening number, while a later song references a “wave of ancient sounds.” They could be talking about the endless roar of the ocean, or then again the great cloud of witnesses that has sung about love and human connection before them. It’s an ancestry that includes John Prine, Nanci Griffith and so many others— and here, the women of I’m With Her take their place in the same lineage.
My rating: 8 out of 10.
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