Review | I’m With Her — and Ready to Follow This Band Wherever They Want to Lead Me

There’s something special about seeing a band you really like to begin with grow over time and evolve into something even better. Such was the case with I’m With Her, the stellar sometimes side-project, sometimes centerpiece-project of multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriters Aoife O’Donovan, Sarah Jarosz, and Sara Watkins.

Presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures to a sold-out Campbell Hall on October 3, I’m With Her played with such beautiful chemistry, passion, and connection, I could almost feel mystical sparks emanating from them on stage. Their new song, “Ancient Light” (from their new album Wild and Clear and Blue), has the lyrics “Better get out of the way / Gonna figure out what I wanna say / I’ve been a long time comin’.”  Well, from where I’m sitting, these women have definitely figured it out, and it sounds freaking fabulous.

Out on tour to promote the album — which is only their second, even though they’ve been teaming up for more than a decade at this point — their set was tight, focused and excellently balanced to focus on each of the musician’s core strengths at different points in the evening. Watkins, an amazing fiddler who’s probably best known for her role in Nickel Creek, the progressive bluegrass group she formed with her brother Sean and mandolinist Chris Thile, has a breathy yet powerful voice that pulls you in, particularly on “Standing on the Fault Line,” a potent new song about putting one foot in front of the other and focusing on the future, not the past.

“It’s hard when you’ve got two different people pushing rocks up different hills,” said O’Donovan. “This band is the opposite of that,” she said, as she spoke about how much fun the group had in Santa Barbara and on the UCSB campus. “These college kids here, they’ve got it pretty good. I kept looking around going, ‘Where are all the adults?’” she laughed.

“I’ll bet they’re okay about the no adults thing,” said Jarosz, as they launched into “Ain’t That Fine,” a song about “celebrating the sneaky good times” from their 2018 album See You Around. That one put Jarosz and her expert strumming skills in the spotlight. That was followed by “Call My Name,” with more of Jarosz’s haunting vocals in perfect harmony with her bandmates. 

One of their earliest songs as a group was “Crossing Muddy Waters” by John Hiatt, and O’Donovan ably took the vocal lead on that one for a stunning encore that put smiles on the faces all around. 

While bluegrass is embedded in the roots of these performers — which Watkins joked about at one point, saying the main topics of any bluegrass song are family, murder, and bad behavior — they only sang one traditional song from that genre. 

Comparisons of I’m With Her’s magical alchemy to others are tough, but for those who like those kinds of descriptors, roots rock and Americana kind of work, but the vast majority of their performance evoked the folk rock trio Crosby, Stills & Nash a million times more than the Old Crow Medicine Show. Their style artfully layers folk-style melodies and harmonies with heartfelt, relatable, very contemporary storytelling. 

Whatever musical category  you want to put them in — I’m With Her all the way, and can’t wait to see how this band continues to evolve on their next visit.