Watkins Family Hour shows can get messy. And that’s what makes them fun.
The sibling duo of singer/fiddle player Sara Watkins and singer/guitarist Sean Watkins play concerts full of covers and new tunes, sudden shifts in style and loads of guests — The Watkins Family Hour’s long-running residence at Los Angeles’ Largo featured dozens of aces including Jackson Browne, Minnie Driver, Jim James and Mandy Moore.
“A Family Hour show is always different, a large part of the show will be songs where the arrangements are called out on the fly or adjusted because we have more soloists or fewer soloists,” Sara told the Herald. “Each show is special and unique but what comes with that is you can’t be precise. It’s just this wheel rolling down hill with its own energy and momentum.”
Pulling back from that controlled chaos, Sara and Sean created new album “Brother Sister” to be intentional, to highlight craftsmanship and intricacies, and redefine the musical conversation they have had for years.
“We wanted to explore the potential to write and arrange as a duo,” Sara said ahead of the Celebrity Series of Boston’s concert stream and live Q&A with the pair on Nov. 15. “We only have four hands and our voices to make all these noises and we wanted to explore that with precision.”
Sara and Sean began the century in the enormously successful bluegrass and folk band Nickel Creek with mandolinist Chris Thile. For the past decade, the siblings have been splitting time between duo and solo projects, side bands and Nickel Creek reunions. This means, nicely, fans never know exactly what to expect from the pair.
For “Brother Sister,” listeners get meticulously constructed songs, intimate fiddle and guitar duets with delicate melodies still sturdy enough for the two to pour big harmonies into. The album has a few guests that fill out an occasional tune, but this is the Sara and Sean show, an LP to give a platform to the siblings first collaborations as songwriters.
“This was the first time we purposefully sat down, purposefully got together on a regular basis, to write songs with each other,” Sean said. “We have bounced songs off of each other for years but never with this intention.”
The process gave the two a chance to check in with each other after years busy with so many musical endeavors and different tours. Writing together gave them time to dig into each other’s experiences and build something new. A good example is “Fake Badge, Real Gun,” where listeners can see in the lyrical exchange how each of the siblings approach the same issue, in this case the insane politics of our age.
“It’s interesting because we have a band thing and family thing, and, like other families, we don’t talk about some things because we assume the other person was where they were 20 years ago,” Sara said. “This album was a really great time for us to sit down and say, ‘It’s been three or four years since we talked about this or that, what do you think about it now?’”
“The process of collaborative songwriting means you have to find commonality,” she added. “This album was a way to take an idea, ask how the other person connected to it, and tell it in one story.”
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November 08, 2020 at 05:41PM
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Watkins Family Hour brings musical conversation to Celebrity Series - Boston Herald
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