Dar Williams is known primarily as a singer and songwriter, with a dozen releases since 1990. But she’s also an author, and writing her latest two books — 2017’s “What I Found in a Thousand Towns” and the still-in-progress “Writing a Song That Matters” — kept her way from music, or at least recording it, for a while.
“I’ll Meet You Here,” which came out Oct. 1, is Williams’ first new album in six years, the longest gap of her career. It’s produced by Williams’ longtime cohort Stewart Lerman and features contributions by Gail Ann Dorsey (David Bowie, Tears For Fears, etc.) and Larry Campbell. The set was recorded mostly during 2019 but delayed by the pandemic. In the meantime, Williams collaborated with Michigan’s the Accidentals, co-writing a song on their “Time Out (Session 1)” EP earlier this year.
• Williams, 54, says by phone that her mission on “I’ll Meet You Here” was to “just write songs. I write songs and then I record them and then I look back and realize that there was a golden thread that connected them — and that’s always exciting. So I wrote these songs, and when I look back I realize the very strong connector is the way we show up to meet time as it happens. It’s really easy to take time personally and impose a lot of judgment on why things happen instead of encountering them with some resilience and even humor. Sometimes the point is just to face the situations as they happen and say, ‘That is what this life is.'”
• While the album’s songs were written and recorded mostly before the pandemic, Williams adds, “it’s weird, because a lot of these songs seem to relate to the pandemic now. But they don’t, really.”
• One of these songs, “Little Town,” was inspired by the travels she writes about in her “What I Found in a Thousand Towns” book. “It was 25 years of observations and a lot of interviews and putting those things together. (‘Little Town’) is very much inspired not just by the information but by the faith I have in people, the faith I have in the resilience of towns. There’s the whole narrative of blue states and red states and division, and to me the opposite of division is unity. The song is about a person who finds a way to collaborate with his town in a way that transcends politics, religion and all those other traditional dividers — a person who meets his town in the same way I’m trying to meet my life.”
• The album concludes with a version of “You’re Aging Well,” which Williams recorded on her first album and then cut as a duet with Joan Baez, who helped to launch Williams’ career. “The album starts with “Time, Be My Friend” and it ends with “You’re Aging Well,” which is a song I wrote sort of at the beginning, of how I was going to be encountering time. My manager suggested that we return to it because it was the 25th anniversary of touring with Joan Baez, and also I’m the same age as (Baez) was when she first took me out on tour. It gives me a chance to talk about Joan on stage, which always makes me happy, too.”
• In addition to finishing the “Writing a Song That Matters” book — which she hopes to have out by fall 2022 — as well as conducting a songwriting retreat of the same name, Williams says she has “about six half-songs” written at the moment. “Nothing’s really complete. One of them has to do with the pandemic, but usually I write about things 10 years after they’ve happened. I’m not the go-to person for incisive, on-site observations, so I don’t think there will be a lot of (pandemic) in there — some, but not a lot. Yet.”
Dar Williams and Emily Scott Robinson perform at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 12, at the Ark, Ann Arbor. Tickets are $35; call 734-761-1818 or visit theark.org.
