Folk Full Circle

I’m With Her’s Sarah Jarosz talks about the band’s upcoming Interlochen co-headliner with Iron & Wine

By Craig Manning | July 5, 2025

“Full circle.” That’s how Sarah Jarosz, one-third of the indie-folk-bluegrass trio I’m With Her, describes her band’s forthcoming concert at Interlochen Center for the Arts.

The last time Jarosz played Interlochen, it was 2014 and she was opening for Nickel Creek, another beloved indie-folk-bluegrass trio. Now, Jarosz is co-headlining the same venue, and she’s doing it with Sara Watkins, one-third of Nickel Creek, as her bandmate.

The Supergroup

I’m With Her, for those unfamiliar, can most accurately be described as a “supergroup,” the term used for a convergence of musical talents who have already achieved success as solo artists or members of other bands.

Jarosz, for instance, has been making records under her own name since 2009, and has won multiple Grammy Awards for them—including Best Folk Album (for her 2016 LP Undercurrent), Best American Roots Performance (for album highlight “House of Mercy”), and Best Americana Album (for 2020’s World on the Ground).

Watkins, meanwhile, is known best as a member of the aforementioned Nickel Creek. She sings and plays violin in that band, which formed in 1989 when she and the other two members—her brother Sean on guitar and their childhood friend Chris Thile on mandolin—were still just preteens.

Finally, Aoife O’Donovan, the third member of I’m With Her, came to prominence in the roots music scene in the 2000s, as part of a progressive bluegrass band called Crooked Still. She’s since built an acclaimed solo career, with highlights that include 2022’s Grammy-nominated Age of Apathy and a COVID-era reimagining of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 masterpiece Nebraska.

Together, the members of I’m With Her will take the stage at Interlochen’s Kresge Auditorium on the evening of Thursday, July 10, as one-half of a double bill that also includes Iron & Wine, the moniker for superstar folk songwriter Sam Beam. Part of a 12-date string of shows dubbed the Robin’s Egg Tour, the show will find the two rootsy bands showcasing tunes from their latest albums. Iron & Wine is touring in support of 2024’s Light Verse, the band’s seventh LP, while I’m With Her is celebrating the release of their second album, Wild and Clear and Blue, which arrived in May.

Deep Roots

It’s fitting that this summer’s Interlochen show will mark a full-circle moment for I’m With Her, because the band’s journey so far has been anything but a straight line.

Jarosz opened for Nickel Creek at Kresge on July 10, 2014, when she was just 23 years old. Two months later, at that year’s Telluride Blues Festival in Colorado, the I’m With Her trio came together for the first time, though it would be years before they’d actually put out an album.

“That was our first real moment as a band,” Jarosz says of the Telluride festival. “We were all there, booked separately for our own projects, and wound up on this side workshop stage together. And it was just this magical moment of realization that [collaborating] could be something really special for us to do together. And so we did.”

While that festival proved to be the colliding point for Jarosz, Watkins, and O’Donovan, the trio had already been running in similar circles for years—a somewhat surprising fact, given that Jarosz is eight years younger than O’Donovan and a decade younger than Watkins.

“[Sara and I] met many, many years ago,” Jarosz recalls. “I was actually nine years old, and she was 19, and I had just started playing mandolin. Nickel Creek played a show outside of Austin, Texas, which is where I grew up, at a festival called Old Settlers Music Festival. So, we’ve known each other for a very long time. And it’s similar with Aoife; I met her when I was about 14 or 15 years old. So, our paths have been crossing for a very long time now, but the band didn't start until 2014. And the show at Interlochen was right before that all happened.”

Keeping It Special

I’m With Her released their debut album as a band, titled See You Around, in 2018. More than seven years later, the second record finally dropped this spring. When asked about the lengthy gap between albums, Jarosz gestures at the predictable factors—namely, busy schedules and a global pandemic—before arriving at the big reason: a desire to keep the band and the music it makes “special.”

Broadly, most supergroups end up going down in music history as footnotes, deemed by consensus as the lesser ventures of storied musicians who achieved greater success elsewhere. Even the great supergroups—The Traveling Wilburys, for instance, which in the 1980s brought together George Harrison of the Beatles, Jeff Lynne of Electric Light Orchestra, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, and Roy Orbison—are rarely considered to be as great as the sum of their parts might suggest.

Jarosz is very cognizant of the supergroup baggage, and says the members of I’m With Her all wanted to avoid the usual pitfalls. Most crucially, instead of having each musician bring their own songs to the table for consideration by the band, I’m With Her made a point of writing and recording every note of their albums collaboratively.

“I think all of us, with this band, we don’t want it to just be different versions of our solo material,” Jarosz says. “We really want to write music together as a band and create a band sound. And so, I think going into this record, we decided to really take our time with that process. And because of the nature of our individual schedules, that turned into writing retreats every fall for three years.”

The first of those writing retreats happened in autumn 2021. Little by little, over the course of the annual sessions, Wild and Clear and Blue came together. And while I’m With Her hadn’t played a concert together in more than five years leading into this summer, Jarosz says the band was always thinking about the live show while writing their newest batch of songs.

“The fun challenge is figuring out what we can do with just our three voices and just our three instruments, because, at the end of the day, the songs have to be able to stand alone just with those elements,” Jarosz explains. “It’s definitely fun to embellish those things over the course of making a record, but we knew that, for our live show, it was just going to be the three of us onstage.”

While I’m With Her will be a three-woman band when they play Interlochen this summer, though, Jarosz says concertgoers can expect one exception: an alliance with co-headliners Iron & Wine.

“I love Sam and love the whole vibe of Iron & Wine, but I’ve actually never gotten to see them live; I’ve just seen videos,” Jarosz says. “So, I’m just really looking forward to it. I think it’s going to be a super complementary evening—with maybe some collaboration thrown in at the end.”

An Iron & Wine Primer

If you’re familiar with Iron & Wine, you know that Sam Beam is a bit of a musical chameleon. Though his early albums are made up of sparse folk songs with whisper-quiet vocals and little more than acoustic guitar for accompaniment, Beam’s musical universe has expanded over the past two decades. Here’s a quick primer to his 20-plus-year career.

The classic album: Our Endless Numbered Days from 2004, which maintains the delicate intimacy and gorgeous folk lullabies of Beam’s 2002 debut album, The Creek Drank the Cradle, but gives them a wider canvas, thanks to a bigger budget and improved recording/production quality.

The biggest hit: While Iron & Wine has never had a “hit” song, per se, Beam didn’t become one of folk’s modern torchbearers by remaining anonymous. He was particularly omnipresent on film soundtracks back in the 2000s, with his songs appearing in movies like Garden State (a cover of The Postal Service track “Such Great Heights”), In Good Company (“Naked As We Came”), and, probably most notably, the Twilight films (“Flightless Bird, American Mouth”).

The best song: “The Trapeze Swinger,” an epic nine-and-a-half-minute treatise on mortality, death, the messiness of human entanglements, and the great big unknown of the afterlife. Sam, if you’re reading this, please play “The Trapeze Swinger” at Kresge?

The new record: Light Verse, Iron & Wine’s first album in six years, found Beam taking stock of his life and his past from the vantage point of a man about to turn 50. “All in Good Time,” a duet with Fiona Apple, is the stunner—unless it’s “Taken by Surprise,” a song about how people can waltz into your life, leave a lasting mark, and then leave just as quickly. Either way, expect this rich, contemplative album to form the backbone of the band’s live set this summer.

The live show: Speaking of the live show, fans of Iron & Wine know that a Sam Beam show can range from solo acoustic troubadour to full-on jam band extravaganza. Recent setlists suggest that Beam’s Light Verse tours have featured a little bit of both.

 

Photo by Alysse Gafkjen