Fall Arts Preview |
I’m With Aoife
Pushing Creative Boundaries with
I’m With Her’s Aoife O’Donovan
By Leslie Dinaberg | September 25, 2025
Read more of the 2025 Fall Arts Preview.
“I think that the line between work and play is very blurry when you’re a songwriter and a musician, and I think we all feel so lucky that we really enjoy each other’s company,” shared Aoife O’Donovan when we spoke last week about her beloved folk trio, I’m With Her. The supergroup — composed of multi-Grammy-winning artists O’Donovan, Sarah Jarosz, and Sara Watkins — will pay us a visit on October 3.
The joy and intimate connection the three women share are deeply embedded into their music, which artfully layers folk-style melodies and badass harmonies with heartfelt, relatable, contemporary storytelling. Though their excellent new record, Wild and Clear and Blue, is only their second album (the first was See You Around, a 2018 release that turned up on best-of-the-year lists from The New York Times, among others), the longtime friends have been performing together since 2014.
I asked O’Donovan about I’m With Her’s origin story. “We’ve really kind of been orbiting in the same world for quite a long time [since 1999 or so]. In 2014, we found ourselves at Telluride, and we were all scheduled to be a part of a workshop. The three of us were the only three who were able to make it to the rehearsal for a Women in Music workshop, and we started singing together, and we realized it was something pretty special,” she said.
“So, later that day, we did an impromptu set opening for The Punch Brothers and kind of the rest is history. We officially started the band about a week later.”
The first shows they did were mostly covers or songs they had written individually. “We didn’t sit down to start writing together until the fall of 2015 when we wrote our first album, See You Around. We went to Vermont for about two weeks, and we wrote that entire album,” said O’Donovan. For various reasons, “it kind of sat there for almost two years before we put it out,” she said.
“And it was so much fun to write together. We realized that we had a really unique way of collaborating, just the three of us. I don’t know of any other writing projects that I’ve been a part of that have been like this, where they’re so equally collaborative on each song, even if somebody’s singing lead, even if somebody’s not even singing at all, it really comes from the three of us, like, very evenly. It’s very, very cool.”
The new album was recorded at two separate New York studios (The Outlier Inn in the Catskills and The Clubhouse in Rhinebeck), which O’Donovan described as a combination of Airbnb and recording studio experiences.
“Is it hard to be in that kind of atmosphere with your good friends and focus on writing and working versus talking and having fun?” I asked.
“I think it’s all part of the same thing,” said O’Donovan. “We are such good friends that we definitely want to talk and have fun. But I think that’s the thing is that in this crazy job, talking and having fun is part of what helps the songwriting process. … You start talking about something, and then you’re like, ‘Wow, that actually reminds me of this lyric I jotted down in my notes app, and how can we turn this into a song?’ ”
While the women have separate careers (O’Donovan as the lead singer for Crooked Still, Jarosz as a solo artist, and Watkins as a member of Nickel Creek) and busy lives, “we have a very similar rhythm to our day,” said O’Donovan. “I think that’s something that has also helped to elongate the lifespan of this band. We love traveling together.”
They’ll travel together to Santa Barbara for a UCSB Arts and Lectures presentation of I’m With Her on Friday, October 3, at Campbell Hall. See artsandlectures.ucsb.edu.
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