Sara Watkins: Last News

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic If you live in Los Angeles and you sometimes feel the heat, congestion or cost of living making you wonder about greener pastures, you may keep a running checklist in the back of your mind of Reasons Never to Move Away. If you live in L.A. and you’re a fan of roots or Americana music, you may keep the monthly Watkins Family Hour shows at Largo on that checklist of reasons not to check out— because in what other city are you going to find such a reliable monthly gathering of the contemporary folk-rock tribe? For 20 years now (maybe 21 — no one thought to start a count in the early 2000s), Sean Watkins and Sara Watkins have been convening some of the top musicians in Southern California, especially those with an acoustic bent, to join them at Largo for (mostly) monthly shows that bring a sense of community to a town where that’s not always easy to find. The extent to which the small, clubby theater enforces its no-phones policy means that potential fans definitely hear about the shows through word-of-mouth, not word-of-video.

Chris Willman Music WriterFamily has almost always been a big part of what Sara Watkins has done; she rose to acclaim with her brother Sean as a member of the pop-bluegrass group Nickel Creek, then, as that band has mostly been on hiatus, has continued on with him as part of another beloved SoCal Americana troupe, the Watkins Family Hour.

Chris Willman Music WriterWith Sara Watkins — of Nickel Creek, I’m With Her and Watkins Family fame — there isn’t any way of knowing… which direction she is going, as Gene Wilder might say. For 2021, she’s taking a perhaps surprising turn toward children’s music with the forthcoming release of “Under the Pepper Tree,” an album of family-suited classic material that runs the gamut from the Disney catalog to vintage cowboy songs to Rodgers & Hammerstein and Nilsson.