Album Review: I’m With Her, ‘Wild and Clear and Blue’
The swirling harmonies and eddying rhythm of Wild and Clear and Blue—I’m With Her’s second album—envelop us completely, transporting us airily into a lush forest of sound. The trio—Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan, Sara Watkins—inhabits the sonic space of each song on the album, living within the notes and between the notes, folding into or floating above or below one another’s vocals, and allowing instruments and vocals to breathe as the songs unfold.
The album opens with the celebratory “Ancient Light,” a whirling meditation on one’s place in the cycle of life. The song gambols along a 7/4 rhythm as the lyrics dance across the portal of time: “While everything’s unraveling/I’m building a fire/Sparks and smoke rings/Fill up the night/When it catches/I’ll be swimming in the ancient light.” The instrumental bridge provides space for each instrument to stretch out. Spry fiddles open the title track, an animated and tender paean to Nanci Griffith and John Prine; we can almost hear Griffith’s voice singing “Love at the Five and Dime” in the sparkling harmonies and in the ringing guitar and fiddle work of the trio. A shimmering chorus opens “Sisters of the Night Watch,” opening into a haunting ode to the intimacy of sisterhood across generations. The minor chord verses blossom into major chord refrains that celebrate connections and belonging: “Sisters of the night watch/Do you know me?/I feel my soul resonate with thee.” Fiddle, mandolin, and guitar dash and dart under and around one another on the nimble Celtic reel “Find My Way to You,” while the gorgeous instrumental “Strawberry Moonrise” elides into the animated joy of “Year after Year.” The gently unfolding ballad “Standing on the Fault Line” evokes the ambivalence we often feel about moving forward from a place we love—even when we know the “fault lines” in relationships or the community are starting to crack—in a new directions. The refrain—“just put one foot in front of the other/don’t look back”—encourages movement.
Wild and Clear and Blue may be the perfect album for our time, for it carries us into a peaceful place where we can luxuriate in the gorgeous sounds all around us and where we can reflect on memories of family, friends, and community.
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Wild and Clear and Blue is available HERE.
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ImWithHerBand.com
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