“Follow me down,” Sarah Jarosz demands of her listeners in the first line of “Run Away,” the first track on her latest album entitled Follow Me Down. And anyone about to drop the needle on this record would be wise to fall in line and answer her call.
To start, the album is packed wall-to-wall with some of Americana’s best and brightest - among them, Jerry Douglas, Béla Fleck, Stuart Duncan, Shawn Colvin, Viktor Krauss, Mark Schatz, Dan Tyminski, Darrell Scott, and Vince Gill. But don’t let the A-Listers fool you - the real star here is Jarosz. Clearly she has spent the requisite time in old time jams learning the ancient tones, but on this record, with her deft writing and refined delivery, she takes traditional music down the rabbit hole and accomplishes something magnificent - she fuses the old and the new in such a way that her music is at once old time and as modern-sounding as anything in the iTunes top ten.
From the aforementioned “Run Away,” a track that owes as much to an old timey murder ballad as it does to an arena rock epic, to a song like “Floating in the Balance,” Jarosz seems to be pushing herself into precarious territory and enjoying it. In the latter track she makes it clear that she has no interest in repeating herself. Her eagerness to step outside of her artistic comfort zone and bask in the uncertainty that such a move engenders is almost palpable as she sings,“Throw away the watches / Call off every bet / The time ain’t mine for saving / But I’ll take what I can get / Holding onto wisdom / Of the ones who came before / Floating in the balance / Of the calm before the storm…” The song is ethereal and dreamlike, and if the arrangement was stripped down, one could almost hear Buell Kazee frailing it. Conversely, bring in Max Weinberg and it’s no more of a stretch to imagine The Boss belting it out to a packed house at the Meadowlands.
“Annabelle Lee,” a musical rendering of Edgar Allan Poe’s last poem, stands as another example of Jarosz’s remarkable ability to weld the old to the new. Poe being Poe, lyrically the song is as tortured and dark as anything that came from the deepest Appalachian holler yet musically, the track wouldn’t sound out of place at Bonnaroo. Thinking about it logically, this almost makes no sense, but the dichotomies Jarosz sets up between the old fashioned and the modern, the dark and the light, and the violent and gentle, coupled with the irrational, counterintuitive-ness of it all is actually what sells the song.
In “Here Nor There,” Jarosz strums her delicious sounding Collings D-1A and sings of the perils of finding and losing true love. The melancholy “Gypsy” paints a poignant picture of life when the luck runs out while “Old Smitty” is an up-tempo instrumental where the chops of the musicians are given a chance to shine.
Oddly enough, the record’s brightest moment is a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Ring them Bells.” Here Jarosz takes Dylan’s weary plea to rescue a world that’s lost its way and spins it into something quite different. Where Dylan’s version has an undercurrent of despair, Jarosz’s version feels
absolutely optimistic - like there’s no doubt the lost sheep will find their way back home. She delivers the lyrics with all the hope of Otis Redding and it feels like she’s unrolling a welcome mat for the long-time-coming change that’s just up around the bend. By going in the tonally opposite direction of Dylan, Jarosz astutely commandeers the song and makes it her own. She sings with a self-assuredness beyond her years (just as Dylan did at her age), which compels the listener to hear her take on the song. She owns it. No small feat when tackling Dylan.
As mentioned earlier, Jarosz is on the move. She’s taking a journey and although she admits she’s not sure where she’s going, she seems keenly aware of the fact that getting lost will ultimately be more fun, if not more rewarding than spinning her wheels in familiar territory. And that’s exactly what makes Follow Me Down is such an enjoyable record. Jarosz’s willingness to take chances and embrace risk without equivocation displays rare grit. That approach, coupled with her more graceful than forceful delivery, seduces the listener into going on the ride with her and forgiving any missteps along the way. And because of her exceptional ability to meld polar opposites, Follow Me Down is a record that could simultaneously please fans of “Twilight” and those who dig reissues of old Library of Congress field recordings. Plus, clocking in at a hair over 39 minutes, the album is lean and free of filler.
Listening to these songs over and over, one thing kept coming to mind: it seems that whenever people talk about this record, they mention how incredible it is that a 20 year old made it. True enough. But in fact, Follow Me Down would be no less of an achievement if an AARP member three times Jarosz’s age waxed it. It’s that good. So don’t be scared. Go ahead, follow... Robert Kimmel This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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