Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz, and Aoife O’Donovan took very different paths to their off-the-cuff debut performance together at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in 2014. A Massachusetts native who was raised singing Irish songs and loving American folk, O’Donovan had just made her solo debut after years in the kinetic Crooked Still. A decade her junior, the multi-instrumentalist Jarosz was already a rising Americana star, her Texas roots balanced by an interest in subtly cinematic sounds. Watkins, meanwhile, had been a figurehead of modern bluegrass for at least a dozen years, her trio Nickel Creek having helped usher in a new generation of listeners. Nevertheless, when they sang together that first time, they recognized the instant connection and soon started I’m With Her, a supreme roots supergroup with a soft heart and a sharp sense of humor. Wild and Clear and Blue is their sophisticated sophomore album, with every trace of hesitation from their 2018 debut erased by years of tours and a 2019 single so strong it netted a Grammy. Written and rendered by all three members together, these 11 spellbinding tunes shape a loose concept album about origins and exits, beginnings and endings. The tender title track is an homage not only to the late hero Nanci Griffith but to that emotional spark that lights the way to a life in music; closer “Rhododendron” drops down by the river with a soulful gospel sway to contemplate where it is we all come to rest. The tracks between those points are revelatory documents of age, of lives being lived—the astral existentialism of “Only Daughter,” the relational tension of “Different Rocks, Different Hills,” the mature contemplation of “Year After Year.” Bonny Light Horseman’s Josh Kaufman produced Wild and Clear and Blue, fostering a textural flexibility that gives these songs extra warmth and gravity. That is especially true for the staggering “Standing on the Fault Line,” a heartfelt interrogation of what it means to call a place home and then consider leaving. Rising from a luminous drone to a sweeping ballad with three-part harmonies, the song steadily ushers in rivulets of electric guitar and a tide of simple, emphatic drums. “Just put one foot in front of the other,” they all sing in the last chorus, voices crisscrossing for extra resolve. “Don’t look back.”