Dar Williams

October 27, 2023 | 7:30 PM

In conjunction with the exhibition “Always Be Around: Corita Kent, Community and Pedagogy,” the Cantor Art Gallery and Prior Performing Arts Center present a concert by singer-songwriter Dar Williams. Dar Williams has been performing for over 30 years and leading a songwriting retreat for over a decade. Her spirit, lyrics and dedication to teaching to are the embodiment of Corita Kent’s ethos “to create means to relate.”

Williams’ lyrics contain bouquets of optimism, delivered on melodies alternating between beguiling lightness and understated gravity. In “I Had No Right,” Williams writes about Father Daniel Berrigan, a friend and contemporary of Corita Kent, “First it was question, then it was a mission, How to be American, how to be a Christian,” which was similarly asked in Kent’s print, “if”: “We are Christians… What does it mean to be a Christian? What does it mean to be human? We sincerely know.”

Teaching an undergraduate course at Wesleyan University about music movements and democracy renewed Dar’s faith in the importance of making music and also in the intrinsic, life-affirming value of creating songs, a process she is excited to be sharing with students at Holy Cross.   

Dar Williams was always in the right place at the right time for the success she’s had over a decades-long year career. She rose out of the vibrant mid-90’s Boston scene, inspired by the eclectic influences of alt-rockers, Berklee jazz musicians, slam poets, and folk artists, like Patty Griffith, Melissa Ferrick, the Throwing Muses, Vance Gilbert, and Jonatha Brooke. After a year of touring non-stop with her first album, The Honesty Room, in 1994, she was invited by Joan Baez to tour in Europe and The United States.

Her latest album, “I’ll Meet You Here,” is inspired by the notion that “Good and bad things happen, and it’s not necessarily a reward or indictment. I’ve just got to meet it. [. . .] Real happiness . . . can just be knowing you have the resilience to meet whatever comes to you. I will call that a good life.”

Cantor Art Gallery