SARAH JAROSZ: String sensation
Sarah Jarosz, who headlines the Three River Arts Festival on Sunday, got a nice boost to her 2017 touring efforts when she began the year strolling up to the stage twice at the Staples Center to collect Grammy awards.
The singer-songwriter from Texas won best folk album for her fourth record, “Undercurrent,” along with best American roots performance for the song “House of Mercy.”
“I’ve watched the Grammys ever since I was a little girl,” she says in a phone interview, “and kind of always dreamed that might happen. So, yeah, pretty amazing and still sinking in.”
Ms. Jarosz didn’t come out of nowhere to carry home Grammys. A mandolin and banjo prodigy from the age of 10, she released her Sugar Hill Records debut, “Song Up in Her Head,” in 2009 when she was just 18, and since then has been showcased on “A Prairie Home Companion” and tours with Sara Watkins, of Nickel Creek.
In 2013, Ms. Jarosz, who was born in Austin and raised in the small town of Wimberley, graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music while also releasing the Grammy-nominated third album, “Build Me Up From Bones.”
For “Undercurrent,” she took a different tack, focusing on guitar and applying her lovely, delicate voice to a full set of original songs.
“It’s super different sonically in my mind from the previous three, in the sense that it’s much more stripped down,” she says. “Before ‘ Undercurrent,’ I had never recorded anything that was just me solo. There was always tons of overdubs and guests, which is awesome in its own way, but with the songs on this record, it was important for me to really capture the sense of solitude. So, I think it’s kind of anchored around the four solo songs. And then, with the other songs, there are guests, but I still wanted to keep that kind of sparse.”
That Grammy-winning standout, the stark, bluesy “House of Mercy,” was written with Jedd Hughes, who co-wrote tracks on her third album and has worked with Patty Loveless, Little Big Town and Emmylou Harris, among many others.
“He had an idea on his phone, just a little voice memo that was titled ‘Jarosz idea,’ that he wanted to save for me, and it was just kind of the little lick,” she says, singing the guitar part over the phone. “He was living in Los Angeles at the time and he said he would drive past this rinky-dink looking church called the House of Mercy, and he thought that could be a cool thing to put in a song. So we kind of took those two things and rolled with it, and I want to say that within an hour, we had the song. It was one of those that rolled out really easily.”
It’s one side of her music, which can range from electric Americana to instrumental bluegrass, a result of eclectic tastes that began early and evolved rapidly.
“When I was 8 or 9,” she says with a laugh, “I was the biggest ’N Sync fan possible. It was always a battle between ’N Sync and Backstreet Boys. I was an ’N Sync girl myself.”
Even while she may have been bopping to “Bye Bye Bye,” the weekly bluegrass jams in her hometown inspired her to pick up the mandolin and then banjo, prompted by Bernard Mollberg, who taught her to play and let her borrow his instrument. He then built her the banjo that she still plays today.
“I was super into it, and then around eighth grade, I discovered Nickel Creek and Tim O’Brien and Gillian Welch, and that became my world. Even though I loved music all my life, it wasn’t until I found that that I said, ‘Oh, I want to do music all my life.’”
She also began to embrace some of the singer-songwriters that her parents played around the house, such as John Prine, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan
“My sophomore year of high school,” she says, “I heard [Dylan’s] ‘Blood on the Tracks’ and became obsessed with it, and it’s all I wanted to listen to.”
She has since done her own haunting versions of “Shelter From the Storm” (a “Blood on the Tracks” standout) along with Dylan’s “Ring Them Bells.”
Stylistically, she’s willing to go wherever her muse takes her in the future.
“I hope to keep my options open, and just to make good music,” she says. “As long as I’m working hard at being focused on the music, I’m not too concerned about the genre.”
And is there any pressure for her to remain in one?
“I don’t really think so,” she says, “and if there is, I don’t really care.”