Dar Williams has the power to evoke memories, inspire change and carry you through a tough time just by playing a song.
One fan wrote on Williams’s Web site, “Thanks for getting me through high school.”
It is with this power that Williams has moved through her 17-year career as a folk singer. Williams will bring her powerful voice and soulful lyrics to the Quick Center this Friday.
For someone who has been performing for almost two decades now, Williams said she doesn’t tire of it.
“I can always project myself into the mind of an audience member hearing a song for the first time,” said Williams. “There is always the opportunity to try to perform it better than I performed it before. Those things keep the whole thing alive.”
Times may have changed, but Williams still struggles with the same issues around songwriting.
“I enjoy songwriting; it still gives me stress but I am still able to look back on a body of work and say look, ‘I’ve done this before,'” said Williams. “It pays to do things like taking myself out to the movies, going out – taking a lot of space to get these songs written.”
Something that seems effortless, including songwriting, is actually tedious and time-consuming.
“I have been waiting and teasing out certain phrases to see if these songs will finish themselves before I go in to record,” said Williams. “They will be done by the time I get into the studio, but I feel like they are going to take their own sweet time.”
Williams approaches songwriting much like she would a journey, beginning with one idea and finding herself in an entirely different place. One example is with “As Cool as I Am,” which started out as a “ballad” about Williams not fearing other women.
In the end, the song took on a different meaning altogether.
“‘As Cool as I Am’ came into my mind and that connected the sense that I will not be afraid of women and I realized that the true manifestation of that song was not sadness or shyness,” said Williams. “It was really something that felt bold and irreversable.”
Williams’s songs are always personal, even if they are not entirely autobiographical.
“It is always personal because it is always how it strikes me,” said Williams. “Therefore it must strike some part of who I am, what I have gone through.”
For Williams, songs are not a personal diary where she can unload her most personal emotions.
“One of my things says that I detest journal-entry songs, and I don’t detest them. There is a place where you can put the question, then there is a place where you put the questions that have more structure to them and that’s what the songs are,” said Williams. “It is not that you find all these answers, it’s just that you really find out what the real question was.”
Williams has always managed to capture both college students and adults alike.
“Early on in my career I opened up for Ani DeFranko and I also opened for Arlo Guthrie at the same place, the Arc in Michigan,” said Williams. “I have often laughed that I have always had both audiences.”
Listeners may claim that Williams’s music has matured and grown over time, but she still feels connected with college students.
“I feel just as giddy and happy to hang out after a show at a college,” said Williams. “I still kind of feel like I am in college going, ‘Oh yeah, I had a professor like that.’ Nothing seems too far away, you think it would but it doesn’t.”
It hard to see a time when Williams won’t be writing songs and performing but Williams claims, like other folk greats, “I am not the one who gets to decide that.”
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