PUTNEY — Next Stage Arts Project and Twilight Music present singer/songwriter Dar Williams as part of the 2021 Next Stage Bandwagon Summer Series, an outdoor, socially-distanced concert series, on Saturday, Oct. 2, at 3 p.m., at Cooper Field on Sand Hill Road.
Fellow singer/songwriter Crys Matthews opens the show.
Known as much for her staunch progressive ideals as her raw acoustic energy, Dar Williams has been captivating audiences with elegance and honesty in her folk-pop songwriting since the 1990s.
As described in a news release, “her lyrics contain bouquets of optimism, delivered on melodies alternating between beguiling lightness and understated gravity.”
A The New Yorker writer called Williams “one of America's very best singer-songwriters” whose songs “are, variously, devastatingly moving, tenderly funny, subtle without being in any way inaccessible, and utterly fresh.”
Williams's growth as an individual over her two-decade-long career has gone hand in hand with her evolution as an artist, touring along the way with Joan Baez, Patty Griffin, Ani DiFranco, Loudon Wainwright III, and Shawn Colvin. She rose out of the vibrant mid-1990s Boston scene, inspired by the eclectic influences of alt-rockers, jazz musicians from the Berklee College of Music, slam poets, and folk artists.
Returning to the road this fall, she celebrates the release of her 12th album, I'll Meet You Here.
Performing as well will be Crys Matthews, a bright star of a new generation of social justice music makers who has released Changemakers, described in the news release as a new “hope-fueled, love-filled social justice album”
As described in her publicity materials, Matthews is a “powerful lyricist whose songs of compassionate dissent reflect her lived experience as what she lightheartedly calls 'the poster-child for intersectionality.'”