Singer-songwriter Dar Williams shares her craft with Groton musicians

Acclaimed singer-songwriter Dar Williams brought a special Valentine’s Day gift to the Circle, performing an intimate concert for students, faculty, and staff on February 13 and holding a songwriter’s workshop for student vocalists and musicians the next morning.

Ms. Williams grew up with English Department faculty member John Capen in Chappaqua, NY. The friends sang together often, including in their high school chorus, and have remained close since, although Ms. Williams pointed out during her standing-room-only concert in the Gammons Recital Hall that she probably hasn’t been on the Circle in twenty years.

The workshop was a take-off on the popular songwriting retreats Ms. Williams has been conducting since 2013. When she first started teaching, she said she was pleasantly surprised at the diversity of people interested in her craft. 

“I found a lot of people who just wanted to write a song, people who were professors, ministers, teachers, people who promised themselves they’d write a song someday and worked their whole career and were in their sixties and came to us and finally started,” she explained. “So it was really amazing to see what a range of people really just wanted to see what it was like to write a song.” 

Looking at the songwriting process as a teacher revealed some universal truths to approaching a song, Ms. Williams said, first among them is finding a voice.

“Every song has its own voice,” she said, “and you kind of start to hear that voice emerge, sometimes before you even know who the narrator is. Is it a fast voice? Is it a slow voice? Is it uptight? Does it speak in Shakespearean English? Is it fancy and frilly, or is it a person who’s very direct and speaks in one-syllable words? From that voice, you start to get information about what’s going on in this song, you start to get your clues and cues about what this song is going to be.”

Paying attention to that voice, and letting it inform the process, can help guide a songwriter even when they don’t have all the information about what the song is going to be, Ms. Williams said. Her songs tend to have lots of words, she added, so she tries to hone in on what words sound interesting to her, and what words sound pretty.

From there, she begins to add music. Admittedly not a music theory expert, Ms. Williams said she memorized chords by hand shapes, and likened chord families to houses.

“This is a C,” she said, strumming her guitar. “The other chords in the key of C are F and G. But even just hearing the word ‘key’ can make people very nervous. So I call them houses.

“The C lives in the same house as the F and then G,” Ms. Williams added as she changed chords. “And each of these housemates has their own moods. The C has its kind of minor mood. It’s what we might call a sad mood, which is an A-minor, and F has its minor, which is D-minor, and the G is E-minor. And I’ve just memorized those. So as I’m playing around figuring out what’s interesting and what's pretty to me, what matters to me, I can kind of futz around in the house. Every once in a while I’ll go to the neighbor’s house and borrow a chord from them, and then I’ll come back to my house. But in the house of C, we have all these moods to play with. It seems very similar, but they have very different moods, just like we have subtleties within our moods. Happy moods, sad moods. Good sad, bad sad.”

After breaking down the process that led her to her 2008 song, “Buzzer,” Ms. Williams turned the microphone over to two Groton songwriters, Ava Bridges ’24 and Ebun Lawore ’24.

Ava played her “Pay My Dues” on acoustic guitar, switching between moody verses and an uptempo chorus accented with percussive hits on the guitar body. Scribbling notes during the performance, Ms. Williams said after that while she didn’t get every word, Ava’s voice was undeniable.

“This song, I think, is so beautiful. I have a thing about first lines, and yours— ‘I’m an angel, I’m the thing you despise’—with that, you’ve got my ear. Add to that voice this dramatic feel to the rhythm and the tempo of the song. It’s this beautiful, interesting language and this very dramatic, moving rhythm. The melody is very pretty, and then the chorus has shorter words and modern language—‘I paid my debts, I paid my dues’—that juxtaposition is very cool.”

Ebun performed her song, “3-10-06,” at the piano, as Ms. Williams looked on from the opposite end. Singing over a slow, repeating musical pattern, Ebun’s narrator remembered a date in sharp detail (“I held you in my arms”), then challenged someone, asking if they could too: “Do you remember anything I ever said?”

“I’ve been doing this for a while,” Ms. Williams said after, “and this is maybe one of three or four times where I’ve had to say, ‘Keep it together, Dar. Don’t start to cry.’

“These songs!” she continued. “This is a very different voice, and there’s so much about what I love about songwriting in that song, my dear, including that essential science of what is pretty and what is interesting. It has such craft in it. When you say, ‘Three, one, oh, oh, six,’ you realize it’s a date. But is it a date on a photograph we’re looking at? Is it a date of an experience, is it a birthday? It could mean any of those things and still mean a lot to me as a listener. There are a lot of things that pull me in and keep me there.”

Following the performances, Ms. Williams answered some questions about her songwriting journey and life in music, from scrambling to write a song for a Pete Seeger tribute record in just a day to making a living as a singer-songwriter in the age of streaming. As the workshop came to a close, she urged the students present to keep creating.

“Here’s music. Here’s the audience,” she said, holding her hands up and then bringing them together. “They want to find each other. They will find each other, because people love music. So we need music, and we need people to make music.”