Sarah Jarosz takes her work up an octave
May 24—Sarah Jarosz had a tougher college decision than most kids her age. The mandolin prodigy had her first recording contract at age 16 and started working on her debut album, Song Up in Her Head, while she was still a high school student in Wimberley, Texas. Her album was released just after she graduated, and then, at age 18, she had a choice: She could start capitalizing on her music career or study at the New England Conservatory of Music.
True to form, Jarosz broke the mold by doing both. She went to school and somehow managed to record another pair of albums by the time she graduated.
"I went back and forth," she says 15 years later as she prepares to play the Lensic Performing Arts Center on Tuesday, May 28. "I had this album out and there was a lot of momentum. But my parents were both teachers, and it was important to them that I go to college. In retrospect, I'm so grateful that I did. Even though I was so busy and recording albums and touring all through college, it still was kind of a buffer zone for me being too young too soon going out on the road."
Jarosz, born in 1991 in Austin, Texas, and raised just down the road in Wimberley, says music has always been part of her life. She loved to sing even before she was given her first mandolin at age 10, and that just turned her love of music into an obsession.
Whenever she wasn't in school, she says, she was playing her mandolin. She loved Texas singer-songwriters like James McMurtry and Nanci Griffith, and she cites Nickel Creek, Gillian Welch, and Tim O'Brien as having a huge effect on her teen and tween years. She says she also was listening to Wilco and The Decemberists and Death Cab for Cutie as well as Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan.
"This was before YouTube existed," she says. "I had one of those machines that slowed down CDs. You could put the CD in and slow things down, and I learned solos that way."
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Sarah Jarosz
* 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 28
* Lensic Performing Arts Center
* 211 West San Francisco Street
* $34-$109
She hit another milestone when she was 16 and started playing an octave mandolin, which helped unlock her songwriting ability. The octave mandolin is strung an octave lower than the conventional mandolin, and because of the way it's held, it provides a large sonic palette to play from.
"Not all octave mandolins are set up this way, but I have it to where the two G strings are an octave apart and the two D strings are an octave apart," she says. "It gives you almost this kind of 12-string guitar octave effect that, depending on the way you're doing the pick stroke, you can grab the higher octave or the lower octave depending on the pick movement."
Jarosz won a Grammy Award for Best Folk album for her 2016 release Undercurrent, and her next album, World on the Ground, won a Grammy Award for Best Americana album in 2021.
The last few years have been busy for Jarosz, who released World on the Ground months into the pandemic in 2020. Her tour was shelved, and she released another album, Blue Heron Suite, in 2021 that she recorded a few years earlier. When the world reopened, she began touring behind World on the Ground and at the same time was polishing a new batch of songs that became her 2024 album, Polaroid Lovers.
"My creativity is cyclical," she says. "I'll have these periods of feeling very inspired and recording a lot of ideas on my phone. Usually that leads to making a record, and what happens is you get focused on learning how to perform live the songs you just wrote; there's not a lot of emphasis on creating new things because you're working on the thing you just created. I like to honor that, and it's helpful for me to step away sometimes and observe and listen to other music that inspires me. Then I start to feel that itch that I have something to say."
On the new album Jarosz collaborated to an extent she hadn't before: Eachsong on Polaroid Lovers has a credited co-writer, and she says the entire album was recorded live in the studio with a full band, unlike her previous albums.
"It was more of a layering process," she says. "Maybe you're in the studio with one other person or two other people, and you're cutting a trio and then adding things onto that. For me, this was a very different process to do it this way with drums, bass, guitar, sometimes piano, and then my instrument, and we're all just going at the same time. It was exciting."
The recording process took just nine days, she says, in part because the songs had been honed to perfection over multiple months. That also represented a change in her life and her career, because early on, time was a luxury she never had on her own.
"I think because so many of my records were made when I was in school, my songwriting was done in any random window I could find," she says of her early days. "Going into this new record, I really wanted to take my time to record the songs until I felt they were bulletproof and I believed in every line. I really spent the majority of 2022 writing, writing, and writing, and co-writing with other people in Nashville. And then I ended up with this batch of songs."
Jarosz says that last bit — believing in herself enough to collaborate with other artists — is a recent development in her life. She resisted working with Nashville songwriters as a teenager because she wanted to make sure her own voice didn't get compromised in the process.
In 2018, she released an album as part of a group, I'm With Her, with Aoife O'Donovan and former Nickel Creek member Sara Watkins that broadened her horizons. She loved collaborating and seeing the magic other artists could bring to her work. Producer John Leventhal is a co-writer on four tracks on World on the Ground, and Daniel Tashian is a co-writer on five of the 11 songs on Polaroid Lovers.
"Now it makes it that much more enriching to collaborate with people, to sit down and do a co-write and feel like there's always something to be gained," Jarosz says. "Maybe it's having a great conversation with someone and maybe you get a new song. Something I think about now is that a co-writer can notice something about your voice that you didn't even know about yourself. They can unveil that. It's been a journey to get here, but I'm glad I was patient."
