Sarah Jarosz had a tougher college decision than most kids her age. The mandolin prodigy had her first recording contract at age 16 and started working on her debut album, Song Up in Her Head , while she was still a high school student in Wimberley, Texas. Her album was released just after she graduated, and then, at age 18, she had a choice: She could start capitalizing on her music career or study at the New England Conservatory of Music.
True to form, Jarosz broke the mold by doing both. She went to school and somehow managed to record another pair of albums by the time she graduated. “I went back and forth,” she says 15 years later as she prepares to play the Lensic Performing Arts Center on Tuesday, May 28.
“I had this album out and there was a lot of momentum. But my parents were both teachers, and it was important to them that I go to college. In retrospect, I’m so grateful that I did.
Even though I was so busy and recording albums and touring all through college, it still was kind of a buffer zone for me being too young too soon going out on the road.” Jarosz, born in 1991 in Austin, Texas, and raised just down the road in Wimberley, says music has always been part of her life. She loved to sing even before she was given her first mandolin at age 10, and that just turned her love of music into an obsession.
Whenever she wasn’t in school, she says, she was playing her mandolin. She loved Texas singer-songwriters like James McMurtry and Nanci Griffith, and s.