I AM SHE AS SHE IS ME AND WE ARE ALL TOGETHER – A WAY OF LIFE FOR I’M WITH HER

With her? They're all her. L-R: Sara Watkins, Aoife O'Donovan and Sarah Jarosz. (Photo by Alysse Gafkjen)

IN A WORLD OF EGOS hugely enhanced but superegos underdeveloped, where it’s not only seagulls crying “Mine Mine Mine” but insecure leaders, to find a trio of singer/songwriters who declare no one is more equal that the others, and then live by that, is a slice of wonder. Even more so when a Grammy – for best American roots song – followed and everyone still talked to each other.

But to have this trio return for a second round of egalitarian folk/country/pop fare where their individual talents seem to act as multipliers of quality rather than detract from it, is a minor miracle. And we just don’t do miracles these days.

Yet there we are with the wryly named I’m With Her, the fruit of the loom of Aoife O’Donovan (once of string band revivalists Crooked Still), Sara Watkins (once of bluegrass springboards, Nickel Creek) and Sarah Jarosz (once of an award-winning solo career as, you guessed it, Sarah Jarosz), whose sequel to 2018’s debut, See You Around, arrives next week.

And once again, this new album, Wild And Clear And Blue, never seems anything but a joint enterprise, an all-for-one-and-one-for-all affair, from writing to playing to singing. That includes who sings lead on each track, explains O’Donovan, as it might be down to who brough the “seed” of the idea, who found the melody that worked, or who just fits the song best.

“I think that when you are in a trio with two other people for whom you have the utmost respect and admiration, it’s easy to back off and not say ‘I want to be this, I want to do this’,” she says. “Everybody listen so well and therefore there have been very few instances, if any, of ruffled feathers.”

Does she pull rank at any time?

“No,” Donovan laughs. “I definitely don’t. Which is funny because I think anyone who knows me would say I am a very strong and bossy person, but I love to be led by Sara and Sarah.”

Well as any high-powered businessmen or former English public schoolboy being led around by someone in leather and whip knows, when power is your usual form, being submissive has its thrills. But let’s keep middle-aged male kinks out of it for now and just say that it can be a relief to not have to make the big calls all the time.

“I think that’s definitely the case. I think for the three of us there is something really nice about being a trio with equal ownership. So you asked who sings lead, but often even if I am not singing lead, playing a supportive role or barely singing, I still feel like it’s my song. I think we all feel that way: every song is ours.”

Beyond the three of them, this album has begun to look a bit more like their live shows with an expanded sound that occasionally feels like a full band. That this is good for sonic adventures, but a terrible plan for the catering budget.

Ah, says O’Donovan, they only had to pay for one extra musician – drummer JT Bates – as each of them can handle a bunch of instruments while multi-instrumentalist producer Josh Kaufmann was already on board and catered for. And even then Bates did his work remotely from his home, so not on the catering budget. Yet another example of the good thinking behind I’m With Her.

Did it feel natural at this point in the band’s career to arrange some of these songs for a fuller sound or did they make a conscious decision to bulk up a bit?

“I think it felt pretty natural to all three of us. The last I’m With Her record it was very stark and very dark and very spare, minimal. But in our other work, especially in the past five years, the three of us have done [more],” Donovan says. “My last album was with a full orchestra, and that was 88 musicians - talk about a catering budget!

“Jarosz made a rock’n’roll-sounding record, Watkins of course has done a ton of work with Watkins Family Hour, and we are all very familiar and very comfortable playing with a full band there. But I think what was cool about this album is we really walked the line: we didn’t go overboard.”

There are any number of songs that are just the three of them, like Mother Eagle or Find My Way To You, and sometimes barely represented beyond voices, like Only Daughter, which has trace elements of piano. In the songs that do have drums and other instruments, arrangements were written so the songs could exist without extras if they needed to on stage.

“Obviously it’s really fun to have those other instruments but we wanted to make sure that we didn’t back ourselves up into a wall where we needed to tour with a big band because we really like to tour with just the three of us.”

If musically this new album expands on what we know of the three, lyrically there’s a broadening as well. I already knew Ford Econoline was O’Donovan’s favourite Nanci Griffith song as a kid, but listening to the thematic direction of the new songs – reflective, engaged in reconciling the past and the present, dealing with the death or drifting away of parents – I can’t help asking whether Griffith’s There’s A Light Beyond These Woods (Mary Margaret), about friendship begun in childhood and partially understood in adulthood, influenced the lyrical direction of this new album.

“Oh my gosh. That song is one of my absolute favourite songs and actually Sarah Jarosz and I have sung that song as a duet at random jams. I think the nostalgia in that song and how that character is growing up and looking back … I mean I can’t even talk about that song without crying: I think that song is one of the most beautiful and perfect songs ever written,” says Donovan.

So, yeah, Griffith, who died four years ago, in general, and that song in particular, played a big role for I’m With Her.

“Our song, Wild And Clear And Blue, when I sing that song I experienced what I wanted everybody to experience, which is this feeling of nostalgia and this feeling of connecting with your parent and connecting with your future, these memories and the idea that the things that your parents had in their childhood you need to ask them all those things: what was paradise? What was a five and dime? And then think about the things that your children, that our children, will ask us. Like what was a landline? Just the way that time passes,” O’Donovan explains.

“That song was a real heavy song and I love how it turned out and I really hope that people will take the time to connect the dots with the Nanci Griffiths references and the John Prine references, traversing through space and time.”

(Just out of fellow fan curiosity, if the saints were at a Nanci Griffith show somewhere in the heavens tonight, what song does O’Donovan reckon they’d ask for? “Gulf Coast Highway I think is the most classic [and she sings the lines] ‘And when he dies he says he'll catch/Some blackbird's wing/Then he will fly away to Heaven come/Some sweet blue bonnet spring’. I feel like the angels would really like that one.”)

Bringing things back to a more sullied earth a bit, while not suggesting Standing On The Fault Line was written about this, given it probably pre-dates the current reign of the orange fascist, there is within it a question to ask any thinking American right now: “Is it when the reservoir dries out/And the birds stop flying south/How we gonna know it’s time to flee?”.

I’m not exactly right, but not entirely wrong with the cultural context.

“It was written in the aftermath of Covid but I think the real remnants of it are less about the virus itself but what it did to everybody’s minds, and what it did to the political landscape and how people relate to one another,” O’Donovan says. “The tragic effects of that, we’re going to be grappling with for many, many, many years, if not generations.”

That song in fact was written with the spectre of climate change wreaking havoc, given added resonance in the wake of the Los Angeles fires, especially as Watkins lives there. But even then, O’Donovan sees it as less about casting judgement and more about a prod to think.

That said, in the context of decades of reshaping society to think about the individual more than the collective, the song and indeed the example of the band, act as examples to live by when shit is raining down on us. It does make you wonder, not least because in front of me is an avowed fan and interpreter of his, if Bruce Springsteen was right when he sang “there’s just a meanness in the world” in Nebraska?

“The really crazy thing about Nebraska and a lot of those songs is that almost all the protagonists are white men without a college degree, right? And almost all of those people voted for Trump. It’s my hope that as Americans we can somehow heal this insane divide, this misinformation and the horror and the hatred, this absolute poison that’s been put into the world,” O’Donovan says with some intensity, the topic close to home. “It’s great to think about Nebraska and how those songs connect with people and then to think about those characters and who they are and who those people are in today’s world.

“If we as listeners can connect with the guy who is singing about watching the mansion on the hill – and he can’t ever get to the mansion on the hill – connect with him and feel something that he is feeling I really hope that at some point we can look to our neighbour and find the connection and heal whatever needs to be healed.”

That healing might once have come in family, in friendships or in communities, but not all of these disgruntled white men of the apocalypse have these options. In another new song, Different Rocks, Different Hills, I’m With Her sing of feeling like a childless mother, then in Only Daughter they’re singing about being an only child – this sense of holding on to or searching for connection runs through the album. Does O’Donovan think friendship fill a hole when kinship can’t?

“Oh, 100%,” she responds immediately. “That said, one of the things that really has connected the three of us as a band is our deep kinship to our actual, nuclear families. A lot of people have not been as lucky as we have been, as three women in this world: we are very close to our parents, we are very close to our siblings, Sarah Jarosz is an only child; Watkins and I have only children. Family is a very important thing, in addition to the chosen family that we have in our community and musical life.

“The sisterhood that we have is a trio, and that you hear us singing about so frequently in this album [is captured in] Mother Eagle, my favourite point of the record. We sing in three-part harmony, over and over again, ‘I don’t want to cry, but I have to/We all gotta go to the other side/It’s a dark road/Let the tears roll/Your life is what you make of it/You’re a fighter/Mother Eagle sing me alive.’

“I love that sentiment of your life is what you make of it, you are a fighter. To me that is the mantra of the record.”

Wild And Clear And Blue is out May 9 on Rounder Records.