Sarah Jarosz tells fans "Follow Me Down"
The 11-song disc is the follow-up to "Song Up In Her Head." "I definitely could have just made a record that was similar to the last one - pretty rootsy," said Jarosz, 19, a student at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. "That would have been a representation of a side of me. But I have all these new sounds and ideas and I just didn't want to hold back on this one."
Like her first album, Jarosz co-produced "Follow Me Down" with Gary Paczosa (Alison Krauss, John Prine, Chris Thile). This time, they had a college course schedule and gigs to work around. They did a session with Punch Brothers in New York, another in Boston with her talented young trio mates Alex Hargreaves and Nathaniel Smith and several in Nashville with Bela Fleck, Jerry Douglas, Stuart Duncan, Viktor Krauss, Dan Tyminski, Shawn Colvin and Darrell Scott. Jarosz played mandolin, octave mandolin, clawhammer banjo and acoustic guitar.
Jarosz changed things around sonically starting with the first single Come Around. "I know for some purists out there, it's like, 'Why do you have to have drums?' For me, it's like, 'Why not?'," she said. She also covered Radiohead on The Tourist Bob Dylan's folk hymn Ring Them Bells.
The disc also includes two instrumentals, including Peace, a song she started at 12 and finished in college.
Instead of going straight to work as a full-time musician after releasing her debut, Jarosz left her hometown of Wimberley, Texas, 30 miles outside of Austin, and headed to Boston's New England Conservatory to study contemporary improvisation on an elite scholarship.
"I wanted something to push me out of my comfort zone," Jarosz said. "I wanted to be playing things that I might not normally play." She has played with Jewish and world music ensembles at school along with live jams with Punch Brothers and Mumford & Sons.
More news for Sarah Jarosz
- 12/21/21: Jarosz heads west
- 03/25/20: Jarosz announces new album
- 06/17/16: Pardi, Kristofferson release CDs
- 03/01/16: Jarosz announces new disc
- 06/18/13: Jarosz builds up to new album
- 10/13/10: Jarosz plans to release single in November
- 03/17/10: Bob Schneider cleans up at Austin Music Awards
CD reviews for Sarah Jarosz
No longer just a startlingly talented young bluegrass musician, on her latest, Sarah Jarosz shows her growth both as a person and an artist. This is her first recording done while she wasn't in either high school or college, the first since her move to New York City three years ago, and the first time she has included only new original material.
It may be the middle one of those firsts that had the most influence on the end results; there is little to no traditional bluegrass material here ...
Aging has worked wonders for Sarah Jarosz because she sounds better and better with each release. On her third disc, the Texas native, who occupies a musical turf straddling bluegrass, country and acoustic music, Jarosz proves to be more confident than ever in her vocal delivery. There's some bite in Fuel the Fire with a lot of banjo, courtesy of Jarosz herself, plucking going on all around here.
Jarosz shines on the pared down, low key take on Dylan's Simple Twist of Fate with a ...
For those of us who have been around long enough to remember browsing through long racks of LPs at the local record store (remember them?), one of the oldest tricks in evaluating an album from a new, unknown artist is to scan the liner notes to see who the sidemen are - the principle being, you can judge an artist by the company he or she keeps. In the CD age, that's not always possible since the credits are often shrink-wrapped away on the inside, but in the case of Sarah Jarosz, it's a ...
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