Grown Up

It’s hard to believe that Sara Watkins is 35 years old; she seems perennially the kid-sister violin prodigy and secret-weapon vocalist who came of age in Nickel Creek. Yet Young in All the Wrong Ways (out July 1 on New West) sounds like such a fresh start for Watkins, who barely touches the fiddle or acknowledges any bluegrass roots, that it might as well be her debut. 

Focused and assured, it finds her strongest collection of original material to date backed by some of the finest musicians in Los Angeles: guitarist Jon Brion, keyboardist Benmont Tench, drummer Jay Bellarose among them, with superb production by the Punch Brothers’ Gabe Witcher.  Bittersweet reflection permeates both the material and her transparent vocal delivery, as if she has shed the skin of her younger self.  It has been four years since her previous solo album, and she has switched labels and management during that interval as well.

The title song introduces the dynamic of tension through contrast, the vocal vulnerability and hint of regret offset by hard-edged guitar and pounding drums. The climactic build of “Move Me” similarly embraces contrast, if not contradiction, and “Say So” sounds like the best sort of Norah Jones song, disarmingly melodic and insistently propulsive.  Other highlights reach farther back—the honky-tonk shuffle of “The Truth Won’t Set Us Free” and the last-call waltz of “Tenderhearted”—but by this point Watkins has established herself as a confident, contemporary artist who knows where she’s been but is more concerned with pushing forward.