Watkins Family Hour
with Special Guest: Margaret Glaspy
Watkins Family Hour is a collaborative musical project founded by musicians and siblings Sara Watkins and Sean Watkins and traditionally held at beloved Los Angeles club Largo. Since the first Watkins Family Hour show in 2002, the duo has released three studio albums, debuting with their self-titled album in 2015, following with Brother Sister in 2020 and, most recently, releasing Vol. II in August 2022. Sean and Sara recorded Vol. II at Los Angeles’s East West Studios in early 2022 alongside a stacked roster of longtime and new Family Hour collaborators, including Fiona Apple, Jackson Browne, Madison Cunningham, Lucius, Jon Brion and more. As with their debut, the band will tour in support of Vol. II, bringing the Watkins Family Hour experiences to stages far and wide.
As both Sean and Sara continue to work on their own solo music, as well as with their other bands like Nickel Creek and I’m With Her, Watkins Family Hour remains an invaluable resource and respite for them both, offering a familiar but ever-evolving space to test new ideas, meet new collaborators and, most importantly, have a good time doing what they love.
On Margaret Glaspy’s long-awaited second album, Devotion, this highly acclaimed young artist reaffirms her status as one of the most sharp-eyed singer-songwriters of her generation while managing to audaciously reinvent her sound. She fearlessly defies expectations — and the results are exhilarating.
Coming home after nearly three years on the road in support of her 2016 debut album Emotions and Math and the 2018 follow-up EP Born Yesterday, Glaspy was eager to challenge herself as an artist and start to make a new album with a clean aesthetic slate. Her bold experimentation has paid off, with tunes that are her most melodically confident, rhythmically compelling, and often incredibly romantic. The arrangements are unexpectedly lush at times, especially on the torchy “Heartbreak,” and often boast an impressive groove, on such tracks as “You’ve Got My Number” and the title song, “Devotion.” Glaspy announces her radical approach at the very start of Devotion, where digitally altered voices serve as the prelude to “Killing What Keeps Us Alive,” and she fills the album with surprising sonic touches, right up to the haunting electronics-and-voice soundscape of album closer “Consequence.”
Glaspy toured throughout the USA, Canada, Europe, China and Australia behind Emotions & Math, including dates with Wilco and The Lumineers among others – she also appeared on NPR’s Tiny Desk, CBS Saturday Morning and CONAN. Finding herself in her Brooklyn apartment after all of her travels, Glaspy admits, “It was such a shift for me that I didn’t know what to do with myself when I closed that chapter. I was feeling pretty shy. I like to be alone and I had constantly been around people for two or three years straight. I took a long breath, reorienting myself, trying to find my in to get inspired and to get excited about making records again.”