Singer-songwriter Dar Williams ’89 released her tenth album, “I’ll Meet You Here” on October 1st. The Argus sat down with the Wesleyan alum to talk about the process of writing the album, dreams, and social justice. 

The Argus: Can you give me the rundown of how this album came to be? 

Dar Williams: I had a book called “What I Found in a Thousand Towns” and, actually, Middletown was one of the [towns] that I profiled. And as soon as I was on the road, you know, touring it, the book, the new songs [just came] into my head for this album.

A: What was the writing process? Was this written before COVID-19 hit?

DW: Yes. It was all in the can. It was 85% in the can before the lockdown started, or before March [2020].

A: I was wondering how your sound has changed [since the beginning of your career] and how you envision it changing more in the future. 

DW: You know, I don’t. I tend to just work with people I trust, and they bring in musicians that they trust and every album just comes out as a kind of a combination of what I heard in my head and what the musicians bring. So there’s no plan to it. It’s actually just letting it unfurl. 

A: What was the writing process like for this album?

DW: I had heard the great TED Talk with [Elizabeth Gilbert] saying to “show up” and say, “I’m not going to do this all by myself.  I showed up. So will you please show up and help me out?” And I thought that’s a good way to make peace with the ambiguity. The feeling of sitting down with your guitar and wondering what’s about to come out of your time noodling. So I started to show up and say, ‘Okay, I’m here. And I’m inviting this creative moment to happen.’ But it was a good way to get me to convince myself to sit down. I found the songs slowly but surely rolling out.

A: Is there anything else you want to say about the process of being able to perform these songs that have been marinating for so long? Is it scary to get back up there?  

DW: No, no, no. The one thing about getting back up on stage is that back in the day, I thought that I should do things so that I could master this traveling life and have experienced more certainty in my traveling and in my performing. And I did accomplish that. Because during the pandemic, I realized that mastering the awareness of uncertainty is the master. You don’t know what’s about to happen on this stage. So live your life knowing that. This kind of career has a lot of variables and mastering that awareness instead of saying, you know, “God dammit, why did I forget my travel mug again?”

A: You said you show up and you sit down with your guitar and the songs come out. Do you typically write the lyrics first?

DW: No, no. What happens is that a little phrase, a musical phrase comes into my head and it has some words attached to it. And I start to build around it, just getting interested and engaged with the question of what those words might mean…I just take that first little phrase—sometimes more than that will show up in a dream—and I’ll just get curious about it. Sometimes I just change it. Like, a song that I was writing about an angst-driven teenage girl turned into a song about Daniel Berrigan. But generally, I’ll sort of take a phrase like an omen. I explore it and then finally finish, finally put it down, explore it until it sort of becomes a thing. And then it has what I call a voice with a capital V, like it has a casual voice. Is this person scared? Is this person excited? Is this person angry? Where are they at? What is the language of where they are, are they on a lake or [are] they on another planet? And then I’ll just try to inhabit wherever that place is, and be in that place and look at the metaphor and write the song. It’s more like I get this first grain, like a seed. And then I just try to plant it in a place where it can grow. 

A: Do you sometimes get stuff from dreams? How does that work? 

DW: Sometimes. I’ve been trying to get back to that. I think that dreams are very cool. It’s random bits of information that assemble themselves. I have the song, “Today and every day.” I woke up with the musical phrase and the words, “If I’m ever gonna make it, if I’m ever gonna make it, then I’ve got to say” I was like, “Oh, okay. You say what?” It started as a song about a bad breakup and it started [out as this]: “If I’m ever gonna make it, then I’ve got to say, we could share the world today and every day.” This idea that after a bad breakup, you have to share the coffee house. You have to share the same friends. You have to share the children, you have to share the world with the person that you are having problems with. And then I just got bored and then I thought,“well, what am I interested in?” And of course, you know, recycling. And so it was, “I’ve got to say, I can save the world today and every day.” But the music was there. What happens is I always wake up and I’m like, that’s too boring. That’s not a song. But I’ve learned to override that impulse and to listen to the musical base that comes out of a dream and follow it without assessing it.

A: For people who haven’t listened to your previous work, is there a particular song that you would recommend starting with? Or should they start just at the beginning of the album and listen all the way through?

DW:  I wouldn’t say that there’s a particular one. It’s really weird, people find things that speak to them and I can never expect. On every album, there’s always one song that surprises me and it pops out in a way that I didn’t expect. And, on this one, the song that popped out that people talked about was a song called “Little Town.” “Little Town” is the story of a person who’s really sort of a bigot who’s basically embarrassing himself by saying, “look, I’m not a bigot. I just don’t want you to be in my town.” There’s a real arc that comes from that. That was very much inspired by the book that I wrote. And also from the way that we keep on thinking like certain towns are one way, but the truth is every town has [these people].

And the truth is, I’ve met a lot of really rigid people and I meet them five years later and something came in that allowed them [to] not only soften and broaden their perspective, but to do it with some dignity, with some grace, and they’re forgiven. They actually come forth and they say, “I apologize, I was wrong.” And they find that the community [says], there’s no mockery around that, [and] we’re all changing. We’re all learning. And it’s okay. Some people are so afraid of change because they’re afraid of being mocked for being wrong. And I just feel like we’re in a world where a lot of children are saying ‘I won’t make fun of you. I just want you to broaden your mind to what the world really is.’

A: Would you say that social justice and those kinds of issues are a central thing that you’re thinking about when you’re writing your songs or are they more something that comes up afterward? 

DW: You know, it’s amazing how going to Wesleyan in the eighties was a great preparation for the 21st century. Thanks to Wesleyan intersectionality, [issues like] the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter and climate justice have been always on my mind. Congratulations, you got to go to this really great place and meet these amazing people. So, the best thing you can do with that education is to know how fortunate you are to be part of the world of solutions and problem solvers. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Annika Shiffer-Delegard can be reached at ashifferdele@wesleyan.edu.