Punch Brothers and Watchhouse join forces this summer for the second American Acoustic US tour, with dates in Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, and New Haven, among others (schedule below and here, with more dates to come); Sarah Jarosz also joins them for most of the dates. The tour takes its name from a June 2016 residency at Washington, DC’s Kennedy Center, curated by Punch Brothers’ Chris Thile, that culminated in a show including his band and I’m With Her, with half the show devoted to extensive collaboration between all the musicians. The two bands then took American Acoustic on the road in 2017.

Thile says: “It took five years, but I’m elated to announce the second traveling edition of American Acoustic for this summer. Joining my fellow Punch Brothers and me in front of a pair of large condenser microphones will be our dear friends, Watchhouse and Sarah Jarosz, for a collaborative evening of music that traverses our respective catalogues and celebrates being together.”

Watchhouse’s Andrew Marlin adds: “My absolute favorite thing to do is sit around and pick tunes with folks. So stoked to hit the road and do just that with some of the best to ever do it.”

Jarosz, who also is a member of I’m With Her, concurs: “I’m thrilled to embark on round two of American Acoustic. There’s nothing better than making music with your friends, and it will feel particularly joyous to collaborate with some of my favorite musicians after so long a part.”

Punch Brothers—guitarist Chris Eldridge, bassist Paul Kowert, banjoist Noam Pikelny, mandolinist/singer Chris Thile, and fiddler Gabe Witcher—formed in 2006 and released its first Nonesuch record, Punch, in 2008. In 2009, the band began a residency at NYC’s intimate Lower East Side club The Living Room, trying out new songs and ultimately spawning Antifogmatic (2010). Those albums were followed by the critically praised Who’s Feeling Young Now? in 2012 and 2015’s T Bone Burnett-produced The Phosphorescent Blues. Their 2018 record, All Ashore, won a Grammy for Best Folk Album. Hell on Church Street, released earlier this year, is the band’s reimagining of, and homage to, the late bluegrass great Tony Rice’s landmark solo album Church Street Blues.

Watchhouse are a duo founded by Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz. The group sings sweet soft songs about the hardest parts of our lives, both as people and as a people. Their career has been a grassroots success story. Over the course of a decade and six albums under the name Mandolin Orange, they went from coffee shop gigs and self-released records to millions of Spotify listeners, headlining sold-out shows at Red Rocks and the Ryman Auditorium, and gaining praise from Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, and NPR. Their most recent release was 2021's Watchhouse, which the band is supporting on tour throughout 2022.

Sarah Jarosz, already a four-time Grammy Award-winner and ten-time nominee at the age of thirty, is a Texas native who started singing as a young girl; she became an accomplished multi-instrumentalist by her early teens. After releasing her full-length debut Song Up in Her Head at eighteen years old, she went on to deliver such critically lauded albums as Follow Me Down, Build Me Up from Bones, and Undercurrent, in addition to joining forces with Sara Watkins and Aoife O’Donovan to form I’m With Her. Jarosz’s fifth studio album, World on the Ground, produced by John Leventhal, won a Grammy award for Best Americana Album. In 2021, she released the Grammy-nominated Blue Heron Suite, a song cycle that she composed after receiving the FreshGrass Composition Commission. She will continue to tour in 2022 in support of both releases.

PUNCH BROTHERS ON TOUR

*American Acoustic