San Diego natives Sara Watkins and Joseph Lorge were in the spotlight Sunday at the 68th annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. Both scored victories prior to Bad Bunny’s historic triumph as the first Spanish-language artist to win Album of the Year honors.
Singer, songwriter and violinist Sara Watkins won two Grammys as a member of I’m With Her, the rootsy trio she co-founded in 2014 with fellow troubadours Aoife O’Donovan and Sarah Jarosz.
Recording engineer Joseph Lorge shared the Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical award with Blake Mills and Patricia Sullivan. Their win came for “That Wasn’t A Dream,” an album of guitar and bass duets by Mills and Pino Palladino.
It was the first Grammy win for Lorge, a Coronado High School graduate who had four previous Grammy nominations. His late father, Barry Lorge, was the longtime sports editor of the San Diego Union.
Watkins, best known as the co-founder of the San Diego-bred bluegrass-and-beyond trio Nickel Creek, shared Grammy victories Sunday with O’Donovan and Jarosz. Their group, I’m With Her, won Best American Roots Song for “Ancient Lights” and Best Folk Album for “Wild And Clear And Blue.”
Their wins came during the live-streamed afternoon pre-telecast portion of the Grammys, which is billed as “music’s biggest night.”
“Holy smoke!” Watkins said, as she Jarosz, and O’Donovan accepted their Grammy for “Ancient Lights.” “It’s really a dream to be part of his community. Thank you all so much.”
Lorge was all smiles as he, Blake and Sullivan accepted their Grammy.
Speaking later backstage in the press room at Crypto.com Arena, Lorge credited his musical foundation to growing up in Coronado, where he began taking piano lessons as an elementary school student.
Joseph Lorge, Patricia Sullivan and Blake Mills won the Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical award for “That Wasn’t A Dream” Sunday at the 68th annual Grammy Awards at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. (Leon Bennett/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)
“I started really getting into music when I was at Coronado High School and the Coronado School of the Arts. I started dabbling in computer technology and (recording) engineering way back then in our school’s music lab” said the 2008 Coronado High graduate, who as a teenager played guitar in the acoustic trio The Wrong Trousers.
Lorge’s many credits include doing audio engineering on recordings by such varied artists as Nickel Creek mandolinist Chris Thile, Jack Johnson, Jon Batiste, Perfume Genius, Lucy Dacus and Remi Wolf. In 2020, he and Sara Watkins each performed on singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers’ second album, “Punisher.”
“Making records is a great excuse to explore the recording studio and see how far we can push all the stuff,” Lorge said backstage.
A Vista native, Watkins had previously won two Grammys. The first was in 2020, when she earned Best American Roots Song hoors for “Call My Name,” a song from I’m With Her’s debut album. She received her first Grammy, for Best Contemporary Folk Album, in 2003 for Nickel Creek’s “This Side.”
Watkins was only 8 when she began attending weekly Sunday bluegrass jam sessions at That Pizza Place in Carlsbad in the late 1980s. It was there that she and her brother, Sean Watkins, met and begin playing with mandolin wiz Chris Thile. The three soon formed Nickel Creek, a group that would earn them international acclaim.
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“What we are seeing here (at the Grammys) is the incredible importance of the community of musicians we belong to,” Sara Watkins said backstage at the awards fete.
“We were able to grow up with musicians mentoring us and learning with other kids, and for me tat was in a pizza parlor. My brother and I would play with other kids and learn from and play with our teachers, and it was such a privilege.
“(The members of I’m With Her) all have similar stories. And a huge part of what I love about music is that handing down of these traditions and how young people can learn directly from the source and from music legends.”