If Sarah Jarosz Has Earned Anything, It's an End to All That Talk About How

If Sarah Jarosz has earned anything, it’s an end to all that talk about how mature she is for her age. It was understandable that people would marvel at the poise the singer- songwriter-picker showed as a teenaged debut artist. But by now she’s spent half a decade in the spotlight, completed a degree at the New England Conservatory, guested on Tim O’Brien, Crooked Still and Kate Rusby albums and recorded three of her own. O’Brien, Crooked Still’s Aoife O’Donovan, and virtually every other innovative A-lister in the contemporary acoustic world were all over Jarosz’s first and second collections. But her latest, Build Me Up From Bones, puts her nimble trio (with Alex Hargreaves on fiddle and Nathaniel Smith on cello) and expressive self-realization front and center. To put it another way, she sounds like the tuned-in young woman she is. There’s just one more thing you ought to know about Jarosz at this juncture, and that is that she’s a real trooper. The day of our interview, my phone line was plagued with dense, unrelenting static; I might as well have had it plugged into a white noise machine at full volume. Faced with having to communicate through that racket, many an interviewee wouldn’t have been able to hold it together, or wouldn’t have even tried. But she was a total, thoughtful pro. JH: You recorded Build Me Up From Bones during your final semester of college. That makes this the first time you’ve gone into the album promotion cycle without having all those competing demands on your time and energy. What’s that like? SJ: I still have yet to kind of discover what it’ll be like, because the summer’s coming to a close, and normally this would be the time that I would be preparing to go back to school. In a way, it’s just been hitting me in the last couple weeks that [college is] really finished and over, and that I completed that part of my life. And in that sense, it’s really beautiful timing. As hard as it was to finish the record in the last semester, now I’m really glad that I planned it that way, because I don’t have to go back to school and I can just work for the record. It also made this summer really nice, because I didn’t have to cram all of my dates into two months like I normally do. JH: Back when you started at the New England Conservatory, there was some discussion then about what the formal, classical study would do to your instincts and vernacular roots. In hindsight, what did it do? Did you ever experience any sort of conflict? SJ: There were certainly a handful of people, when I was making the decision of whether to go to school or not four years ago, that were kind of worried that maybe it would get in the way of my [creativity] or whatever. I know [longtime co-producer] Gary [Paczosa] was worried about that. But honestly, it was nothing but positive. One thing that I say a lot is that it really got me out of my comfort zone. JH: Because of all the different styles of music you were exposed to. SJ: Right. All the different styles and ensembles and musical situations I had never really done before. I think the challenge for me after school is continuing to put myself in those out-of-comfort-zone situations. And I think that’s a big part of my decision to move to New York. JH: I read that you’d moved to New York, which surprised me a bit, since you were already in Boston, where there’s a great acoustic scene, and you could’ve gone back to the Austin area, where there’s a lot going on in roots music, or come down to Nashville, where you’ve done all your recording. And yet you went to Brooklyn. SJ: Yeah, I’m actually in Manhattan. You know, I’ve wanted to move here for pretty much as long as I can remember. I came here when I was 15 for the firs time and just fell in love with it then. I mean, the music scene in Boston is fantastic, and that’s really a big part of why I wanted to move there, on top of school. But a big group of my friends there kind of made the migration down here to New York. That’s a big part of it, but also just being here, like I was saying before, puts me out of my comfort zone, you know? To stay in Boston or live in Nashville or go back home, those all seem within my comfort zone. This was the one thing that kind of scared me a little bit. JH: Is there a hipster acoustic scene up there? SJ: I suppose you could call it that. [laughs] I just moved here about a week ago, so I’m still very fresh to it all. …You know, a lot of the Punch Brothers live here. Some of the Deadly Gentlemen live here. Now Alex [Hagreaves], who plays with me, also is moving to Brooklyn. So it feels like an exciting place for acoustic music. JH: I read Andy Langer’s Texas Monthly feature on you. He talked about some of the decisions you faced in making this album that you didn’t necessarily have to face with the first two, now that there are no limits on how much you can tour to promote it. The question became what kind of album you would make, how big or commercial the sound would be. With all that in play, how’d you make your decisions about the character of this album? SJ: Having this be my third album, it becomes more apparent that a lot of those things are kind of on the table, in terms of commercial accessibility and all that stuff, at least for people surrounding me. And to be perfectly honest, that’s never been a high priority of mine. I’m not gonna lie and say I don’t want it to be successful. I think any musician does. But with that being said, I don’t think that that’s the intention behind making the music, and the choices of how to make the music. For me, it felt the most clear, in terms of my vision for how it should sound, and I think a lot of that had to do with touring with Alex and Nat [Nathaniel Smith] as a trio for the last few years. Just that consistency of texture musically and, you know, personally from having that one sort of sound. I really felt like when I was writing these songs for this album that that’s sort of how I was hearing a lot of them. And I think that’s the biggest different between this album and my last two. The last two really started with just me by myself, even in the studio. We would often just start with my part, record that and then we would overdub everyone else on top of that, whereas this time the nucleus of more than half the record is with Alex and Nat. JH: Your trio has a pretty unique lineup. You switch between a lot of instruments. Then you have fiddle and cello, as opposed to upright bass. What makes that configuration work so well for you? SJ: The textures that the three of us can create are really appealing, I think. And there’s also something to be said for just three people, just a trio, playing music. There’s a lot of space within that. And that’s something that’s really appealing to me, to have that option of, “Okay how can we make these instruments make the most sound that we can make, and how can we also find [creative ways] to leave space within the music?” …Some people might look at these three instruments and say, “Well, there’s not much you can do with that.” But I feel like it’s the opposite, really. And the three of us just have such a great history together. We all met at music camps when we were very young. JH: Which music camps? SJ: Well I met Alex seven or eight years ago at the mandolin symposium in Santa Cruz, California. Chris Thile was a part of the first one. Then David [Grisman] and Mike [Marshall] kind of took it over from there. Then I met Nat at the Mount Shasta Camp in California. … Then Nat and Alex met at the Mark O’Connor Fiddle Camp. So it comes from that history of us just playing with each other for fun. I started playing solo shows, and then I started hiring them for gigs, and then it just kind of organically turned into a really cool thing. JH: You co-wrote a couple of songs on Follow Me Down, but it seems like you’ve waded deeper into the co-writing thing this time and worked with some songwriters who’ve work in roots music and had mainstream success: Darrell Scott and Jedd Hughes. What were you looking to get out of those collaborations? What difference did they make? SJ: To be quite honest, I was a little hesitant to dive into the co-writing at all. For so long, songwriting was such a personal, solo thing.

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