Dar Williams has been engaging audiences with her musical artistry since the early 1990s when she rose from the Northeast coffeehouse circuit to the national spotlight. Dar has released 7 albums, including 2005’s acclaimed, My Better Self and she has just released her first DVD, Live at Bearsville.
Early in Williams’s music career, she opened for Joan Baez who would make her relatively well known by recording some of her songs (Williams also dueted with Baez on Baez’ live album Ring Them Bells performing Williams’ You’re Aging Well). Her growing popularity has since relied heavily on community coffeehouses, public radio and an extensive fan base on the Internet. In recent years, she has performed on nationwide television shows such as Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Throughout her career, Williams has toured with artists such as Mary Chapin Carpenter, Ani DiFranco, Shawn Colvin, etc. A native of New York’s Hudson Valley, where she still resides, Williams maintains in her life and music a strong system of values, idealism and community involvement.
Dar told us how Kerouac has inspired her as a songwriter: “There’s a song I wrote that’s called Are You Out There…and the first lines were hey Jack Kerouac, I wonder if you were the youngest child like me. Everybody was so smart. But you’re the only one who knew how to be free. And I think that that was really important to me to see someone who just cherished the originality of his soul and was willing to follow that as its own kind of genius.”
