I’m With Her Returned With Wild and Clear and Blue
6 min read
I'm With Her performing at First Avenue in Minneapolis.
I'm With Her performing at First Avenue in Minneapolis.
I’m With Her released Wild and Clear and Blue in May 2025, their second studio album and their first in seven years.
All eleven songs are credited to the three members jointly, which is unusual enough to be the defining fact about how the record was made.
Eleven Songs, Three Names on Each
Shared credit across an entire album is rare even in bands, and considerably rarer in a group made up of three established solo songwriters.
Most collaborative projects divide the material. One writer brings a song, the others arrange it, and the credit reflects that.
Writing every track together requires a working method built on consensus, which is slower and produces different songs from the alternative.
It also means no member can point to a track as theirs, which removes a common source of friction in bands of this kind.
Three Solo Careers in One Room
Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O’Donovan each have substantial solo catalogues and independent audiences.
Watkins came up in Nickel Creek, one of the most influential progressive bluegrass groups of the last thirty years. Jarosz and O’Donovan have both built careers spanning bluegrass, folk and singer-songwriter territory.
Groups formed from established solo artists usually struggle with scheduling and with whose voice leads. The joint writing credit suggests those questions were settled at the start.
Seven Years Between Albums
Their debut arrived in 2018, and seven years is a long gap for a group whose members are all actively releasing solo work.
That gap is straightforwardly explained by three parallel careers. Aligning three touring and recording schedules is a logistical problem, not an artistic one.
It also means the project only convenes when there is a reason, which is arguably why the output has stayed strong.
Josh Kaufman Produced It
Josh Kaufman produced the album, and he is one of the more distinctive figures working in American roots music.
He is a producer, a multi-instrumentalist and a member of several bands, and his production tends toward warmth and space rather than clarity for its own sake.
Reviewers have described the result as polished, which for a record built on three-part harmony is a defensible choice. Harmony needs room to sit and can be ruined by an over-busy arrangement.
Harmony Is the Instrument
The central element of the band’s sound is close three-part vocal harmony, which is a specific technical skill rather than a general vocal ability.
Singing tight harmony requires the three voices to blend rather than to be individually identifiable, which is difficult for singers who normally front their own records.
The tradition it draws on runs through Appalachian sacred singing, bluegrass and the country brother-duet acts, and it rewards precision over expression.
Progressive Bluegrass as a Category
The band get described as progressive bluegrass, which is a real category with a real history rather than a marketing term.
It refers to musicians trained in bluegrass technique applying it to material outside the traditional repertoire, and it has been an identifiable strand since the seventies.
The distinction from mainstream bluegrass is largely about harmonic vocabulary. The picking is traditional; the chords are not.
A Supergroup That Behaves Like a Band
Groups assembled from established artists are usually short-lived, because the individual careers reassert themselves.
What distinguishes this one is the durability: a second album seven years after the first, from the same three people, with no line-up change.
The shared writing credit is probably the mechanism. A group where nobody owns the songs is a group with less to argue about.
The Grammy Field This Year
The album is nominated for Best Folk Album alongside records by Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson, Patty Griffin, Jason Isbell and Jesse Welles.
That is an unusually strong field spanning traditional string-band music, a solo acoustic songwriter record and two produced albums.
A category that can hold all of those in one year is doing something right, whatever the outcome.
Why Vocal Groups Are Rare Now
Records built primarily on vocal blend have become uncommon, and the reason is partly technical.
Modern production isolates and tunes individual vocals, which works against blend. Three voices recorded separately and corrected do not sound like three voices in a room.
Groups that prioritise harmony therefore have to record differently, usually together and with minimal correction, which requires a producer who will accommodate it.
The Live Proposition
A group like this is essentially a live act with records attached, and the touring is where the audience is built.
Three-part harmony performed live is genuinely impressive in a way that is difficult to convey on a recording, because the audience can see that nothing is being fixed.
That is a durable advantage. A live show that cannot be replicated at home is the most reliable asset any acoustic act has.
What Seven Years Does to a Second Album
A long gap removes the expectation of continuity. Nobody is measuring the record against a sound established eighteen months earlier.
It also means the three members arrived with seven years of separate work behind them, and that experience necessarily changes what they bring to a joint session.
The risk is that the group has become three soloists rather than a band. The joint credits suggest otherwise.
Roots Music’s Institutional Support
American roots music is supported by an infrastructure most genres do not have: public radio, folk festivals, listening-room venues and a set of awards that take it seriously.
That network gives records like this a route to an audience without commercial radio or playlist placement.
It is why an album of eleven acoustic songs with no obvious single can be a viable release rather than a passion project.
How Three People Write One Song
Co-writing across three people is structurally different from co-writing across two, and anyone who has tried it will recognise the difficulty.
With two writers, disagreement resolves by negotiation and one of them eventually concedes. With three, every disagreement produces a majority and a minority, and a group that resolves things by vote will systematically discard the most distinctive ideas, because distinctive ideas are the ones two out of three people find strange.
The alternative is unanimity, which is slower and produces fewer songs but keeps the odd choices in. Eleven tracks from a seven-year gap suggests something closer to the second method.
It also explains why groups like this tend to work in concentrated bursts rather than continuously. Writing by consensus is exhausting in a way that writing alone is not, and it is not a mode anybody sustains indefinitely.
Recording Voices in the Same Room
The technical decision underneath a harmony record is whether the singers stand together around one or two microphones or are recorded separately on isolated channels.
Separate channels give an engineer total control. Each voice can be tuned, timed, compressed and placed independently, and a weak take can be repaired without redoing anything else.
Recording together gives up all of that in exchange for one thing: the singers hear each other in real time and adjust pitch and phrasing continuously, which is what blend actually is. No amount of post-production reproduces it, because the adjustments happen inside the performance.
Any record where the harmony is the point has to make that trade, and the audience can usually hear which way it went even if they could not explain why.
What Is Actually Being Tested
Two things. Whether a fully collaborative writing method produces songs as strong as the members write alone, because consensus can round the edges off material.
And whether the group can sustain a third record, which is the point at which most projects of this kind quietly stop.
Eleven songs, three writers on every one, seven years between albums, and a band that only exists when all three of them decide it does.
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