Dar Williams

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 Known as much for her staunch progressive ideals as her raw acoustic energy, for decades Dar Williams has been captivating audiences with her sheer elegance and honesty in her folk-pop songwriting.

 Williams writes from personal experience. 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 has called “the big picture of how people approach life.”  The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Spin, and Paste magazines have called her one of America's very best or most influential singer-songwriters of her time.

She rose out of the vibrant mid-90’s Boston scene, inspired by the eclectic influences of alt-rockers, Berklee jazz musicians, slam poets, and folk artists, like Patty Griffith, Melissa Ferrick, the Throwing Muses, Vance Gilbert, and Jonathan Brooke. After a year of touring non-stop with her first album, The Honesty Room, in 1994, she was invited by Joan Baez to tour in Europe and The United States.

Williams has always been very interested in how we can control our future. But like everyone else, she spent 2020 in a state of non-control because of Covid. The songs in her most recent album I’ll Meet You Here, recognize that you have to be willing to meet life as it arrives.

“Good and bad things happen, and it’s not necessarily a reward or indictment. I’ve just got to meet it.” Williams observes. “Like, I’m bringing my whole life to this moment; it will surprise me, challenge me, show me where I was wrong, even make a fool out of me, but my job is to show up and not take adversity personally. Real happiness doesn't have to feel like Snoopy dancing with Woodstock; it can just be knowing you have the resilience to meet whatever comes to you. I will call that a good life.”

As well as recording more than a dozen albums, she is also an accomplished author, educator and urban-planning expert. Her book Writing a Song That Matters is based on her popular songwriting retreats. She made her career touring small towns, and in What I Found in a Thousand Towns, she writes about those towns and how to rebuild American’s communities. 

Dar Williams last performed at Folkus in 2015.

Dar Williams, one of America's very best singer-songwriters… Her songs are beautiful. Some are like finely crafted short stories. They are, variously, devastatingly moving, tenderly funny, subtle without being in any way inaccessible, and utterly fresh—not a cliche or a clunker in her entire songbook. --The New Yorker

Seasons change, but Williams remains both ambitious and pleasingly plain-spoken... And importantly, she seems more at ease than ever. -- Rolling Stone

This project is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrants Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by CNY Arts.

This project is made possible with funds from the Tier Three Project Support program, a regrant program of the County of Onondaga with the support of the County Executive and administered by CNY Arts.