Alysse Gafkjen
Audio By Carbonatix
The three women collectively known as I’m With Her — Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O’Donovan, each clad head to toe in black — stood center stage Friday at the Majestic Theatre.
Although they were a few feet apart, stationed at individual microphones, they sang as one. Over and over, they would drift closer together, forming a loose circle before returning to their stations, trading out instruments and generally making conjuring exquisite beauty seem as simple as drawing breath.
From the moment the three women materialized on stage, until their departure some 80-odd minutes later, it was a transcendent display of talent and one of the finest concerts yet seen in North Texas this year.
That Friday’s showcase, the trio’s first appearance in Dallas in seven years (and its second headlining appearance at the Majestic), was also loose, funny and, frankly, life-affirming. It felt like nothing short of a magic trick.
“Folks, we were walking around downtown Dallas, and popped into Neiman Marcus, as one does,” O’Donovan offered at one point. “Did you know you can buy champagne from a vending machine?”
“Is there a white-gloved hand offering it to you?” Watkins wondered. “Keep us posted on what you find out,” Wimberley native Jarosz cracked. “This is more of a beer crowd, I think.”
Apart, Watkins, Jarosz and O’Donovan are each acclaimed singer-songwriters, recipients of countless industry honors and wholly capable of transfixing an audience single-handedly. (Opener Jon Muq, an Austin-based singer-songwriter who caught the ear of the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, did a superb job captivating the room single-handedly, his bright, pop-flecked folk songs provoking enthusiastic applause.)
Together, the expressions of self, in service of the collective, are no less moving to behold. Friday’s crowd might have been on the criminally thin side, but those gathered in the Majestic Theatre, judging from the largely reverent silence, understood the magnitude of what they were beholding.
Opening up with “Find My Way to You,” a track from the supergroup’s sophomore album, Wild and Clear and Blue, I’m With Her, backed by nothing more than tasteful lighting and expansive drapes printed with images of a forest at sunset, filled the air with its tripartite harmonies, floating along on fiddle, mandolin and acoustic guitar.
The group, which exudes a breezy camaraderie, draws from folk, but also reaches beyond to incorporate country, pop, gospel and bluegrass, as exemplified by its choice of covers Friday: The Chuck Wagon Gang’s tangy hymn “Lord, Lead Me On” and Joni Mitchell’s achingly romantic “Carey,” stylistically poles apart, but emblematic of the elasticity and dexterity of I’m With Her’s skillset.
As impressive as the seamless vocal blend was the delicate, tensile strength of the playing — Watkins and Jarosz and O’Donovan deftly traded between a multitude of stringed instruments throughout. The tempos accelerated and slowed on a dime; cascading harmonies were matched by the lively fiddle in counterpoint to the lightly picked mandolin or banjo and steadily strummed acoustic guitar.
Something Watkins said as she introduced “Ain’t That Fine,” a song from the group’s 2018 debut, See You Around, lingered as a striking way to summarize the entire evening: “It’s about the magical moments that sneak up on us — we’ll celebrate all that for a few minutes.”
At a moment of such division, cruelty and ugliness, evident even if you pay only cursory attention to the events of the world, the serendipity of art — the sheer alchemy of I’m With Her — provided several hundred humans with a respite of unity, beauty and grace. The vibrations of the strings and the resonance of the vocal cords emanated out into the darkness, binding us all together for a brief while.
The night was, indeed, extraordinary — a tonic for troubled times, soothing souls with the simplicity of the human voice, leaping into the air, wild and clear and blue.
