Dar Williams Live in Seattle

Dar Williams' 18-year career has been full of understated goodness. Without much fanfare—albeit ten studio albums, a critically acclaimed collaboration with Richard Shindell and Lucy Kaplansky (Cry Cry Cry), two books of young adult fiction, and countless tour dates—she has crept her way into the hearts and souls of a rather large audience.

Dar Williams Promised Land Live

On this night, in a packed house at Seattle's historical Moore Theater, Williams is welcomed to the stage by the kind of warm applause you'd expect from long-time friends. Indeed, now on her tenth release Promised Land, she follows her own musical legacy with more personal tunes about incredibly intimate moments. Hers is the kind of music that accompanies your life in the foreground. Her songs often feel like long lost friends with whom you've split many a bottle of wine. And, when she finally gives in to the all-night-long pleas for her classic "When I Was a Boy" (purchase/download) the entire theater falls into the kind of silence that can only accompany intensely intimate nostalgia.

But, in the 90 minutes leading up to that encore, Williams pulls mostly from Promised Land, giving the songs a more raw and intimate turn than the album itself was able to muster. On the disc, she's backed by a full band that includes everything from horns to strings to keys. Tonight, however, she's backed only by Bryn Roberts on keys and Heather Lloyd on djembe—both also add backing vocals, although their mics are so low that their voices are more echoic than anything.

Good Songs, Good Stories

She opens her set with "The Easy Way" (purchase/download), and moves through some of the new disc's finest selections—"Book of Love," "Farewell to the Old Me," "Buzzer"—but it's the stories between the songs that make her live set such a draw.

"I like to say I enjoy classic film," she tells the crowd halfway into the set, before admitting her real hobby is "think[ing] about things, worrying about them," and then drawing up top ten lists of ways she can fix those things. Most of her lists have to do with environmental policy, and she shares a few examples before breaking into a beautiful rendition of "Blue Light of the Flame" (purchase/download) from 2005's My Better Self.

Indeed, Williams' stories are full of her peculiar, intellectual New England humor. Then, much like her songs, they reveal themselves slowly and determinedly until, circuitously, they make important points about life in general. It's the kind of fanfare-free artistry that has driven Williams' career through nearly two decades—the quiet honesty that turns your heart before you even realize what's happening.

Unexpected Sincerity

Then, suddenly, the show draws to its close, and Williams lights into a rendition of "When I Was a Boy" that's even more earnest than the original, hanging the audience on the tune's final line: "I have lost some kindness, but I was a girl too." Even though most of her fans knew the line was coming, she delivers it with an unexpected sincerity that keeps the room quiet even after the song is over. But then, that reliably unexpected sincerity is exactly why the packed houses turn out again and again to see Dar Williams.