I’m With Them

The song, ​“Overland,” came near the end of the show. Like so many memorable songs, it both told a specific story and tapped into a timeless universal longing.

I was wondering when the trio was going to play a memorable original song.

For about an hour, I had been enjoying watching the band’s members — Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donovan and Sara Watkins — rotate on lead vocals and instrumental solos while the others blended in with spot-on harmonies and masterful guitar, banjo, mandolin, and fiddle picking, strumming, and bowing.

I’d heard many of the songs before, though I don’t know them well. Like many of the group’s fans, I’ve spent countless hours listening to the songs they’ve recorded since forming their trio four years ago as well as the music they’d produced in their previous musical lives: O’Donovan as front person for the seminal bluegrass-rooted Crooked Still (my favorite 21st century band until this group’s emergence), Watkins in Nickel Creek, and Jarosz with … well, Sarah Jarosz, the acoustic prodigy whose career took off long before she was old enough to drink or drive.

It hit me, as Wednesday’s show proceeded, that while I’d heard and replayed so many of the original songs before, I never walk around singing any of them. None stuck out. The playing stuck out. The writing didn’t.

It hit me that their songs that I listen to most and remember most were written by other people. Songs like …

… Adele’s ​“Send My Love (To Your New Lover) …

… and Bob Dylan’s ​“Ring Them Bells.”

In those cases, Jarosz, Watkins and O’Donovan don’t ​“cover” the songs, in the sense that they faithfully reproduce the arrangements or the solos or the vocal inflections. Instead, they grab the essence of the songs and make them their own, finding new harmonies or rhythms or meanings through their distinctive talent and inspiration. The way they began their careers riffing off American roots melodies, then branching out.

Indeed, Wednesday night’s show took off after the midway point when the trio launched into a medley of straight-ahead bluegrass-gospel numbers. They leaned into a single microphone, stopping and starting vocals in split-second unison, speeding up and slowing down at unpredictable curves, tight at every turn yet loose enough that you could see (and hear) how much fun they were having playing together.

Then came ​“Overland.” As Watkins explained in introducing the number, it tells a specific story about leaving home for the West Coast, and at the same time a universal story about taking risks, about making dramatic changes in search of a better life.

Goodbye brother, hello railroad
So long, Chicago
All these years, thought I was where I ought to be
But times are changing
This country’s growing
And I’m bound for San Francisco

With the audience in its thrall, I’m With Her segued into a haunting rendition of John Hiatt’s ​“Crossing Muddy Waters.” Again, it didn’t mimic the original. Their harmonies, their instrumental pacing, O’Donovan’s forceful, soul-mining lead vocal swept us along on a new journey. The song was as ​“original” as the previous one they’d performed.

As was the encore, a rendition of Joni Mitchell’s ​“Carey,” faithful to the scale-soaring spirit of the original with a new (fuller? deeper?) tripartite depth. (The video of that performance is from I’m With Her’s show in Westbury last week.)

So the evening ended up memorable after all.

It’s no small feat to write one memorable song. That can take a lifetime for the lucky few who can pull it off. And ​“Overland” comes from the group’s latest recording, signaling that it has just begun to soar. Here’s betting that I’m With Her adds more memorable originals — while creating countless more original renderings of other Americana gems — before the trio hangs up its axes.