DAR WILLIAMS
Onstage with her acoustic guitar and finely etched, deeply personal songs, Dar Williams may seem like a solo artist. But she actually surrounds herself with communities, via everything from her concerts to her hometown organizing.
On Oct. 18, she will perform for her longtime fans at the Outpost in the Burbs in Montclair. “I’ve been coming there for more than 20 years, so I know where to park and what door to use,” she said with a laugh. “I’ve been an admirer of Montclair for as long I’ve been coming there. I hope the feeling is mutual.”
Williams has been observing the communities in which she has played since emerging as a singer-songwriter in the mid-1990s. In 2017, she even published a book, “What I Found in a Thousand Towns: A Traveling Musician’s Guide to Rebuilding America’s Communities — One Coffee Shop, Dog Run, and Open-Mike Night at a Time,” in which she highlights the “positive proximity” that bind people together despite their differences.
Williams notes that concerts are, in a sense, a small community. “I get a lot (from concerts),” she said. “There’s sort of a warmth that I experience from the audience. It’s just an automatic thing that they’ve chosen to come here and they bring down the lights. Events have a real feel to them, and we’re all sort of in it together. … There have been a lot of political moments that have been very precarious and felt very malevolent. And then you go to a concert and you recognize all of the ways that we’re willing to sit (together) in a dark space.”
The cover of Dar Williams’ book, “What I Found in a Thousand Towns: A Traveling Musician’s Guide to Rebuilding America’s Communities — One Coffee Shop, Dog Run, and Open-Mike Night at a Time.”
Though Williams’ first career goal was to go into theater as a playwright, she switched to music after moving to Boston after college. She credited this to the presence of a strong music community.
“You could go to an open mic any day of the week,” she said. “So I would go to the open mic and then, of course, you fall in love with one of your fellow songwriters and so you have to follow that person all over the place and you discover even more open mics. So somewhere between romance and the scene, that’s where I found myself.
“It’s so much determined by the community around you. I’m a great example, because I came up as a theater person and left Boston as a musician.”
Her big break came in the mid-1990s when Joan Baez invited her to be the opening act on a national tour, and recorded some of her songs. Over the years, Williams has toured extensively, released critically acclaimed albums, performed at many benefits, and organized songwriting workshops. She also co-wrote “The Tofu Tollboth,” a book about finding healthy food options on the road.
Her last album, I’ll Meet You Here, came out in 2021. As with all her albums, it explores the universal in the personal, sparking recognition among kindred souls.
At the Montclair show, Williams said, she will play songs from her next album, tentatively titled Hummingbird Highway.
“I’m probably going to inflict a few new (songs) on the audience,” she said. “A couple have never been performed, so there’s going to be a lot of world premieres.”
About the upcoming album, she said: “There’s a lot about civilization. There are a lot of really simple ways that we can recognize how incredibly fortunate we are to live in a civilization. I think about it all the time: This town has made these signs and these streetlights and these sidewalks just for me.
“Death enters the room from time to time,” Williams said of the album, adding “I don’t know if that’s in the songs or not, but I really took a lot of stock and recognized that, as the Buddhists would say, joy is limitless. I feel like I tap in there.”
She said that “during the pandemic, I said ‘happy’ doesn’t always feel happy, and so happiness is a very complicated thing. And once I realized that happiness doesn’t always feel happy, I discovered how truly happy I am. I like that happiness is a complicated thing, and being civilized is a complicated thing.”
DAR WILLIAMS
In parallel with her music career, Williams has become an “amateur sociologist,” she said, working on building community in the Hudson Valley where she lives now, as well as documenting and encouraging it through her “Thousand Towns” book.
The book grew out of her touring in the United States and seeing where goodwill was being built regardless of residents’ differences. In her own town, she helps organize an annual thrift sale to benefit a food pantry, and intergenerational events such as singalongs and sessions where young people teach older residents how to use their newfangled electronics.
Musicians, she said, “are all junior detectives, because we’re all looking for good coffee. And the places that have good coffee are those kinds of groovy, neighborhood-y places where there’s warmth. Those places — the neighborhoods with a certain amount of warmth — are the places where writers can write and people can build on something good that’s in the air.”
Williams will perform at The Outpost in the Burbs at The First Congregational Church in Montclair, October 18 at 8 p.m., with Pat Byrne opening. Visit outpostintheburbs.org. For a chance to win two tickets, send an email to njartscontest@gmail.com by 11 a.m. Oct. 15 with the word “Williams” in the subject line.
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