‘Undercurrent’ runs deep for Sarah Jarosz
Amid New York City’s frenetic energy, Sarah Jarosz sought a little tranquility. The singer-songwriter and Wimberley native moved to the city three years ago. There she became captivated by the Onassis Reservoir, a large body of water in the city’s Central Park.
“If you look at it from above, it looks like a heart in the middle of all the craziness of the city,” she says.
Most obviously, the reservoir inspired “Jacqueline,” written about its namesake. But looking at the water, Jarosz also found imagery that fit her recent songs about restlessness, uncertainty and solitude. She named the album “Undercurrent.”
“That word just kept peeking out at me,” she says. “And its multiple meanings made sense to me: The underlying feelings and influences, and also just the water, the current below the surface moving in an opposite direction.”
The album opens with the line “All my troubles just begun,” and travels dark waters from that point forward. A striking recording, “Undercurrent” is Jarosz’s first release since she graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music, where she juggled her studies with three previous albums of increasingly daring acoustic roots music.
A teen prodigy, Jarosz picked up the mandolin at age 9. So her instrumental chops on the mandolin are beyond question. But with “Undercurrent,” she emphasizes mood rather than virtuosity, spinning an ethereal variety of folk music of her own. The songs are reduced to bare essentials, lightly applied instrumentation and Jarosz’s haunting voice.
“I was really adamant this time around about capturing the spirit of the solo performance,” she says. “I think in the spirit of trying different things, we’d push them along on my other albums. But this