Sara Watkins was born June 8, 1981, in Vista, California, and by 1989 was the eight-year-old fiddler in Nickel Creek alongside her brother Sean and mandolinist Chris Thile. This episode examines what growing up inside a touring progressive bluegrass trio taught her, from technical dexterity to the harder skill of knowing when not to play, and what happened when the band’s seven-year hiatus left her alone with a blank page and a severe case of imposter syndrome.

The hosts follow her signing with Nonesuch Records in 2008, the counterintuitive choice of Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones to produce her 2009 solo debut, and the trial by fire of opening for Robert Earl Keen, Tift Merritt and Donovan Frankenreiter. They then map the communities she built next: the Watkins Family Hour residency at Largo, the supergroup Works Progress Administration, I’m With Her alongside Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O’Donovan, and the session work that has placed her fiddle on records by John Mayer, Phoebe Bridgers and the Killers.

• Why the hosts call her early years a communal apprenticeship in negative space rather than a boarding school
• How a bass player’s instinct to build the floor made John Paul Jones the right producer for an artist learning to trust her own songs
• The Watkins Family Hour albums of 2015, 2020 and 2022 and regulars such as Benmont Tench, Sebastian Steinberg and Fiona Apple
• Solo records Sun Midnight Sun, Young in All the Wrong Ways and Under the Pepper Tree, plus Instrumentalist of the Year at the 2016 Americana Music Honors
• Her marriage to Todd Cooper in 2008, a child announced in 2017, and the idea of fiddle as the sonic mortar in modern production