Sara Watkins: All in the Family
photo credit: Jacob Boll
On her latest solo set, Sara Watkins manages to bring a childhood sense of wonder to fans of all ages—with help from the band of her own youth, Nickel Creek.
If there’s one thing that the past year has taught most people, it’s how to maximize their downtime—or at least do things a little differently.
Sara Watkins was an 8-year-old aspiring fiddler when, in 1989, she formed Nickel Creek with her 12-year-old guitarist brother Sean and their mandolin-whiz neighbor, Chris Thile. Since her late teens, when that trio took off for real, Sara’s life had been a seemingly nonstop touring and recording cycle. “It was rare to be home for more than a few weeks at a time,” Sara, now 39, says.
When Nickel Creek split in 2007, still at the top of their game, Sara went solo: more albums, more tours, still not much time to sit back and reflect. (Nickel Creek did mount a major reunion in 2014 to celebrate their 25th anniversary; they have regrouped on occasion for special performances ever since.)
There were other projects too, notably the all-female trio I’m With Her and Watkins Family Hour, featuring just Sara, Sean and whichever friends they decided to round up. And, somehow, in 2008 she managed to find the time to marry actor/ director Todd Cooper; their daughter arrived in 2017.
Then, in March 2020, came the you[1]know-what. At home with no place to go, but fortuitously able to spend quality time with her child, Sara found herself thinking about music through the ears of a three year old.
Under the Pepper Tree, Sara’s fourth solo album, is the result of that experience. “I was trying to find things that I wanted to listen to and I couldn’t, so we decided to make it,” she says.
The album, Sara stresses, is a “family record,” which, she notes, is not necessarily the same as a children’s record. “I was looking for songs that hit that mark for me—without being so simple and childlike that there’s no real place for grownups there,” she says.
The 15-track New West release runs the gamut from Disney classics (“When You Wish Upon a Star,” “Stay Awake”) to covers of tunes by The Beatles (“Good Night”) and Harry Nilsson (“Blanket for a Sail”) to familiar earworms like “Moon River,” “You’ll Never Walk Alone” and “Beautiful Dreamer.” “Edelweiss” is taken from The Sound of Music, while Gene Wilder first sang album opener “Pure Imagination,” penned by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
There are a couple of mini-reunions on the collection as well: Sara’s Nickel Creek mates join her in harmony for “Blue Shadows on the Trail,” which was famously recorded by Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers back in 1948. The cowboy song became familiar to the trio over the many times they watched the 1986 comedy Three Amigos together. And the other two members of I’m With Her, Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O’Donovan, come together with Sara on “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” another selection associated with the Sons of the Pioneers.
Produced by Tyler Chester, who also contributes numerous instruments throughout the album, Under the Pepper Tree is rounded out by a couple of Sara’s originals, including the instrumental title track. Sara notes that the tune was inspired by the abundance of California pepper trees she encountered during her youth.
“They’re very soft and mulchy and wonderful with bare feet, and great trees to climb,” she says. “This record is definitely an outlier in my career. It’s a concept record. And it was bizarre to me when I realized that I had made a concept record because I never really understood how those were made. But I wanted to make it; it just felt like the thing I wanted to do this year.”
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“I’m so proud of her,” Sean Watkins says, as he thinks about the genesis of Under the Pepper Tree. “It’s funny because we’re together all the time and we’re always working on stuff, but I didn’t even know she was up to this until she was right about to record it. I went into the studio a couple of times while she was making it and heard some of the early phases and I was blown away.”
“It’s really a mosaic,” Thile adds. “She’s taken these songs from various pieces of art and entertainment and created this particularly enveloping collage of childhood memories. For me, listening to it as an adult, I can only imagine what kind of technicolor dream world it must be for a child. She’s kind of plopping me right back into all of these really happy immersive memories.”
Yet, Sean says, “Culturally, there’s nothing about it at all that’s only kid[1]oriented.”
Fittingly, Thile and Sean are offering their assessments just days Nickel Creek reunited for the two-part A Livecreek Experience livestream, which found the trio reprising the songs from their self[1]titled 2000 album, as well as other tunes from their catalog. Despite having not played live with Nickel Creek since 2019, Sara says the experience was “like riding a bike.”
Looking back, it was that Alison Krauss[1]produced album that truly catapulted Nickel Creek through the bluegrass and Americana ranks. What had begun, in Sara’s own words, as “a crummy kid band,” had started to evolve into something original. The three-piece unit, in itself, was something of an anomaly (could it even be called bluegrass without a banjo and upright bass?), but there was no denying—when their three instruments and voices blended—that Nickel Creek was headed for big things.
Sara was first attracted to that style of music when, as a small child, she heard a local band called Bluegrass
Etc. performing at a pizza parlor in the neighborhood where the Watkins and Thile families lived. The family-friendly atmosphere gave Sara the notion that playing music was “this very natural thing that seemed like everybody did or everybody could do,” and she asked her parents if she could learn the violin.
“I don’t know what it was about the fiddle, but something drew me to it,” she says.
And that love has never left her. “It just brings me so much joy when I can lose myself in practicing fiddle for a while,” Sara admits. “And part of that is just being able to concentrate and focus and overcome little challenges here and there,” she says.
As Sara navigated her way around her fiddle strings—and later the guitar and ukulele—Sean continued to develop into a consummate guitarist and Thile quickly emerged as a mandolinist of some outsized skill. For a while, when they sang, Sara says, “We sounded like chipmunks,” but then, eventually, that fell into place too and Nickel Creek became a real band. (“It felt incredible,” Sara says.) In time, they also started to receive invitations to perform at choice festivals, even landing a gig opening for John Hartford at Telluride Bluegrass.
Fate stepped in when the Thile family moved away from Southern California, but the Watkins siblings stayed in touch with the mandolinist and, once they were old enough, the three friends picked up where they’d left off. Soon after, Nickel Creek signed a recording contract with the Sugar Hill label, bringing their music to a much wider audience, and their ceaseless road-hopping earned them cred on the emerging jamband circuit. But, after several years, Sara remembers, she and the others began to feel stuck.
“During the making of [the 2005 album] Why Should the Fire Die? I remember being in the studio and thinking, ‘Are we going to do this for the rest of our lives?”’ she says. “It felt like we had farmed that creative ground to its ending point; there were not a lot of nutrients left there to articulate. I was 24 at the time, and it was pretty intense. We just decided that it’d be good to have time to do other stuff. We did one more tour and put it on the shelf. It was bittersweet, but it was pretty obviously the right time for all of us. We didn’t want it to get to a point where anybody was resentful, or it was toxic.”
Sara released her self-titled debut — produced, intriguingly, by former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones—on Nonesuch Records in 2009, writing more than half of the songs herself. But even by her own admission, it was tough going for a while, particularly when it came to working the stage without a band.
“Making solo records wasn’t terribly scary for me,” she says. “That made sense. I was surrounded by encouraging, wonderful friends on that first record. The terrifying moment for me was doing solo shows. The first time, my instinct was to run out the door and down the alley—with my ukulele in hand—and never look back. I knew it was crazy, but I really did have that flight response. It was really hard to overcome that.”
She did, in time, although there were often obstacles along the way, including some inattentive, impolite audiences. “When you tour, you get to know venues and the audiences that they attract,” Sara says. “There’s a culture at different venues and, depending on what you want, you can find it. There were several shows on that first tour where I realized, ‘Oh, this is what opening acts do; they have to suffer through it.’ I wanted to cry and walk off the stage. But, then I realized that this is an absolute rite of passage and necessary for my learning. It immediately gave me a lot of compassion for every fellow performer I ever saw.”
Now, says Thile, “She oozes confidence in a way that she didn’t earlier. I think all three of us really benefited from the time away [from Nickel Creek].”
For her second release, 2012’s Sun Midnight Sun, the fiddler once again stepped things up as a songwriter, but it wasn’t until the next one, 2016’s Young in All the Wrong Ways, that her direction as a solo performer truly came into focus. Writing or co-writing all of the songs, she began to take bold steps away from her roots, using expanded instrumentation and moving into new stylistic areas.
“That’s really the record that I’m proud of,” she says. “I feel like I’ll be able to stand behind that record until the end of my days. I said what I meant to say on that record. There were a number of shifts that were happening in my life, some big issues, and I took a stance and put words down. I remember feeling OK about everything—OK with my life. And I realized there’s a lot that I should care about right now that I’m not caring about. When I decided to engage and dig, I ended up processing what I found out and wrote these songs. That’s how Young in All the Wrong Ways came out.”
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As Sara’s personal life went through its own seismic shifts—marriage, motherhood—so did her musical output. I’m With Her’s origins date back to a 2014 Telluride workshop and the one[1]off session slowly jelled into a more serious undertaking over time. Sara and Jarosz had known each other since they were kids; O’Donovan met the others some years later. After releasing a handful of singles, they recorded an impressive album, See You Around, for Rounder Records in 2018. It received smashing reviews.
“I’m With Her and Nickel Creek have been the two biggest bands of my career— my two family bands,” Sara says. “I spent my first two years as a parent on tour with Jarosz and Aoife. It just felt like the cherry on top to have them be a part of this new record as well because they have been such a big part of my life as a parent. It was really nice to be able to connect and find all these places where we overlapped. We were able to find the best places where we could each contribute, and give each other room in those ways. They’re just great teammates.”
Then, finally, there’s Watkins Family Hour: Sara and Sean and whatever accompanists and guests they can rustle up for their livestreams and shows. The two have been doing loosely structured gigs, in the form of a variety show—primarily at the Los Angeles club Largo—since 2002, joined by everyone from Jackson Browne to Fiona Apple and Booker T. Jones. In 2015, the siblings released their self-titled debut, followed by Brother Sister five years later. Yet, for Sara, Watkins Family Hour is not as simple as Nickel Creek minus Chris Thile.
“We worked to make it something different,” she says. “The best way that we found to do that was to play with other people. I credit the Family Hour, and the opportunities of playing regularly during our residency at Largo, for a huge part of my musical development. It opened my eyes up and my ears up in so many ways. I feel like I really started learning how to sing there. That gig was our way of letting our hair down. With Nickel Creek, there’s so much concentration on precision and executing the songs the way we want to, with very specific arrangements that we compose into the songs. What the Family Hour was to us, and remains to us, is an opportunity to play songs that you like, maybe once—an opportunity to try out songs that aren’t completely finished, to just experiment and have fun and play with other people.”
Still, fans can’t help but wonder whether another substantial Nickel Creek reunion might be in the musicians’ future. “We all feel there’s always a future for Nickel Creek,” Sara says. “Just because it’s not our only outlet doesn’t mean that we’re not in it. We are always in this band and we’re always going to be in this band. It’s really great that we can be in other projects, write for other projects, be parts of other collaborations in different capacities and then be able to come back and do this. It’s so important for anybody, any musician, to have a few different outlets and things to challenge them in different ways.”
For now, though, Sara’s main focus is, understandably, on Under the Pepper Tree. “I wanted to introduce my daughter to songs that I loved when I was growing up,” she says. “So many of these songs have this beautiful imagery that is full of imagination and dreams, and the melodies and harmonies soar. It’s just gorgeous. I really loved learning these songs. Many of them were designed for children, but the expanse of the lyrics, as well as the depths of the melodies and chords, create this sentiment—this well-wishing—that I think we all need to hear whether we’re 4 years old or 74. We all need to remember what it feels like to be held and loved.”
