One of my favorite folkies, Dar Williams, will perform at The Palladium Theatre on Feb. 4. Joshua Radin opens. Tickets are $27.50, go on sale Dec. 19, and are only available through the Palladium box office, which means no Ticketmaster bullshit.
I had a great phoner with Williams back in 2002. Here's the opening couple paragraphs from the profile that ran in Creative Loafing back in the Weekly Planet days:
Dar Williams isn't just another chick with a guitar, a troubled past and an ax to grind. She is a smart songwriter with an emotive soprano, a luminary among artists being filed under the "contemporary folk" tag. Although her music is often fleshed out with enough muscle to easily be called rock, she is a folk artist by virtue of the fact that in addition to penning relationship-probing narratives, she is not afraid to occasionally allow her political views, especially on topics such as environmentalism, surface in her work.
"I'm really interested in the health of the planet and I'm less interested in my personal health," cracks Williams. "I eat a lot of crap. I drink coffee. I eat meat. But, I'm really concerned about the planet." The self-effacing singer/songwriter refers to herself as a "social liberal."
But, unlike others populating the neo-folk genre, Williams does not berate listeners with snobbish left-field musings.
This article appears in Dec 10-16, 2008.