Doors open at 6:00 pm. Tickets will be $30 at the door.
Beloved singer-songwriter Dar Williams is set to release her ninth studio album, In The Time Of Gods, on Razor & Tie on Tuesday, April 17, 2012. Dar’s first album of original material in four years is produced by Kevin Killen (who has worked with such giants as U2, Elvis Costello, and Peter Gabriel), and features special guests Shawn Colvin and Larry Campbell, and a remarkable set of musicians including Charley Drayton, Gerry Leonard, and Rob Hyman. Williams presents 10 original compositions on In The Time Of Gods, which explores many of today's most challenging social issues told against the parables of Greek mythology. The inimitable collection of songs includes some of the richest and most evocative writing of Williams' career.
On one level, the sizable body of work accumulated by celebrated writer/artist Dar Williams is a continuing narrative of her life — what she’s experienced and what she’s observed during her years of intensive touring. On another, it forms a detailed look at the course of modern-day existence in the decade and a half between 1993, when Williams released her debut album, The Honesty Room, and 2008, when her longtime label Razor & Tie released her seventh and most recent studio album, Promised Land. Throughout her career, Williams has employed a reporter’s keen eye and a fiction writer’s feel for nuance in the act of confronting what she’s described as “the big picture of how people approach life,” doing by examining and illuminating the minute details.
Williams’ greatest gift as a writer is her ability to get inside the heads of her characters, no matter how removed their mindsets and values are from her own, doing so with consistent and sometimes surprising compassion, exemplified by the dysfunctional extended family of “The Christians and the Pagans” (from her second album, 1996’s Mortal City, and newly recorded during the acoustic sessions) and the true believer of “Teen for God” (from her sixth LP, 2005’s My Better Self ).
Williams’ growth as a person over her 15-year career has gone hand-in-hand with her evolution as an artist. Raised in Chappaqua, N.Y., and educated at Wesleyan University, Williams spent 10 years living in the thriving artistic community of Northampton, Mass., where she began to make the rounds on the coffeehouse circuit. Joan Baez, an early fan of her music, took Williams out on the road and recorded several of her songs. In 1995, two years after self-releasing The Honesty Room, she signed with Razor & Tie Entertainment, beginning a long and mutually beneficial relationship. Along with her six studio albums — also including The Green World (2000) and The Beauty of the Rain (2003), each amply represented on the balanced Many Great Companions — she’s also released the onstage document Out There Live (2001) and the DVD Live at Bearsville Theater (2007).
At the core of Williams’ work is a belief in the innate ability of people to make a better world, the product of countless observations in her travels and conversations with her fans. If anything, her optimism has intensified as she’s crisscrossed America during the tough times of recent years. “My big secret,” she says, with a twinkle in her eye, “is that we are gonna make it — but we’ll be the last to know.”
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