Dar Williams: Making Musical Magic With A Little Help From Her Friends

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Dar Williams
Dar Williams

Indie filmmaker Noah Baumbach once said that the nice thing about collaborating with someone is that your works becomes a conversation. For singer-songwriter Dar Williams, this kind of a conversation wound up becoming Emerald, her ninth studio album that was released earlier this year. The 11 songs that make up this latest project wound up having the Mount Kisco native work with a number of friends including Richard Thompson, Jim Lauderdale, Lucy Wainwright Roche and her mother Suzzy Roche, The Milk Carton Kids and Jill Sobule. For Williams, it was quite the organic process. (For a list of Dar Williams influences, click here.)
“It was an interesting album because I kept on hearing different voices singing on it in my head and I wrote it with four different co-writers and two covers on it,” she explained. “It was like a big boat. There were a lot of friends involved with it and in the end, it’s sort of a way to capture a moment in time of the people that I know right now and all the fun things we get to do together.”

DarWilliamsFeature_121615.EmeraldAmong the highlights to be found on Emerald are Williams’ work with Sobule (a power poppy “FM Radio”), Thompson (the shimmering title track) and The Hooters (a twangy reading of Joe Strummer’s “Johnny Appleseed”). The 48-year-old singer-songwriter found herself embracing the act of working with other composers, spending a week down in Nashville for the express purpose of writing songs with friends like Lauderdale and Angel Snow and even flying out to Los Angeles and recording in Thompson’s home studio.

“[Writing with others] is a good challenge. It keeps you focused. When you’re writing by yourself and if it’s not working, you can put it down fast and you don’t have that luxury [with another person],” she said. “You have to keep on working on it together, so that’s really great. If it starts to get off track from what you thought in your mind should happen, there’s kind of a tug-of-war of saying something and seeing if they have a better idea. Or saying something or kind of rolling with it for a while. Even that is kind of good for the psyche.”

Jill Sobule
Jill Sobule

The beauty of the passion that lies at the heart of what Dar Williams does is how often other facets of her life wind up influencing what she does on the musical side of the fence. A class Williams teaches at Wesleyan College wound up inspiring Sobule when the latter was approached about writing together.
“Jill and I had done a bunch of dates together and I’ve been teaching a course about music movements in the United States,” Williams explained. “[Jill] was so excited about the early 1970s and took out her computer and pulled up all these great bands and names. She was really into and I knew that excitement. So when I wanted to write that homage to that culture in the 1970s [“FM Radio”], I wrote her and asked if she wanted to do it. She wrote back immediately said yes.”

DarWilliamsFeature_121615.UsdanAs socially conscious as they come, Williams’ three causes she passionately supports are renewable energy, arts in the schools and community gardens. She’s supported the latter in particular via Give Bees a Camp, a program that finds Williams going to summer camps and planting flowers without chemicals in what she calls “…an oasis for a lot of natural wildlife.” The idea is that it’s a fun activity that winds up benefiting bees and humanity. Long Island has been among the beneficiaries of this program as Williams wound up bringing this program to the Usdan Summer Camp for the Arts in Wheatley Heights out in Suffolk County. Give Bees a Camp even led to Williams cutting the aforementioned Strummer cover.

Joe Strummer (Photo by Joe Kerrigan)
Joe Strummer
(Photo by Joe Kerrigan)

“A great radio programmer up in Woodstock named Jimmy Buff sent me a note saying he hoped that I’d listen to this Joe Strummer song,” Williams recalled. “I loved it so much that as soon as I heard it, I knew I wanted to record it and I wanted to record it with The Hooters because they are such an iconic American band. I also wanted to give it the sound from this side of the ocean and that was a lot of fun too.”
With a mindset of social consciousness that hearkens back to the ‘60s, Williams makes it clear that bettering one’s community doesn’t have to be a massive expensive effort and can be as easy as throwing a dance party, charging minimal admission and donating the money to a local cause.

“I tell people to do what I call Five Dollar Disco Fundraisers. Get some kids together, get an iPod mix and a mirror ball and charge everyone five dollars a person to dance your asses off. You get people talking, moving and doing things together and if you’re there, the next fundraiser you’ll do is for the school or library,” Williams said. “Don’t call it love, call it the Disco Fundraiser. Find all of the interconnectedness of your community and someday you’re going to wake up, realize that you put a lot of love into that place and your kids are going to be proud to grow up there and you feel like you did good work in the world.”

Dar Williams and special guest Lucy Wainwright Roche will be performing at Port Washington’s Landmark on Main Street on Friday, Dec. 18. For more information, call 516-767-6444 or visit www.landmarkonmainstreet.org.

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