DAR WILLIAMS' SONGS TEND TO START SMALL. First, a cluster of words and/or musical notes bubbles up from some hidden corridor of her psyche. Then, like a paleontologist deducing what a creature from another time looked like from bits of bone and cartilage, she searches for clues to the nature of the full song.
This first happened to Williams when she was just 11. The line "I should be happy where I am" popped into her mind, paired with a snippet of melody. Recognizing those words as the title of an unwritten song, she took her first steps toward becoming the folk singer/guitarist/songwriter she is now.
"I said, 'Oh! I'm writing a song!"" she recalls. "What rhymes with 'am' from 'I should be happy where I am?' What would that melody sound like, and if this song has this title, where do I think it might be going? What's interesting to me right now? What's true and honest to me?"
Years after that first encounter with her muse, Williams began stockpiling song material while pursuing a double major in religion and theater at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Through those studies, she absorbed elements of storytelling, performance, and spirituality that would later inform her music and stage presentation.
Williams' education in theology had a profound impact on her. "My joke was that every religion that I studied, I tried to convert to, and then the semester would end," she says.
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