Eliza Hardy Jones charts the tumultuous road to parenthood on 'Pickpocket'

Eliza Hardy Jones and her partner went through hell and back trying to have a baby.

The Philadelphia multi-instrumentalist has played in Iron & Wine, Grace Potter and The War on Drugs, but on her latest solo effort, Jones explores the yearslong journey — full of loss and grief — she went through to become a parent.

"I think I turned to recording and songwriting as a way to help myself navigate out of that," Jones says of the music that eventually became Pickpocket.

In this session, she talks more about surviving grief, how she nearly walked away from her solo career, being a vocal coach for the Philadelphia Eagles, and Jones talks about her other passion: creating quilts from folk songs.

"So, each of these quilts is an exact transcription. It can be read like a piece of music, an exact transcription of the song as the woman sang for me on the day when we did the interview," she says.

Plus, we have live performances from Jones recorded here at World Cafe with help from WXPN's John Vettese.

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Miguel Perez. Our senior producer is Kimberly Junod and our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.