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Live Music: Folk

8:00pm

Dar Williams
    “With every album, I’m trying to figure out what I don’t have to say, while still giving each song its due,” Dar Williams says. Of her new album, Promised Land, Williams commented, “On this one, I was paring the stories down to their core. I wanted the songs to sound simple and down to what they were meant to be, which is hard to do. It takes a lot of knowledge to get to the point where you can say what you need to say — no more, no less.”
    To peel her insightful, melodic story-songs down to their essence, as well as inject them with the energy and momentum they clearly called for, Williams enlisted Brad Wood, a Grammy-nominated producer and musician known for his work with rock singer-songwriters Liz Phair, Pete Yorn, and Ben Lee. “Dar was looking to try something different and get out of her comfort zone,” Wood says. “She had made a number of records and it seemed like a good time, career-wise, for her to make a change. I was flattered that she thought to ask me to help. Her voice is so great that you can do just about anything behind her and it’s going to sound cool!”
    Throughout Promised Land, rather than tie the songs together around any particular theme, Williams presents a collection of disparate stories and characters. She writes about trying to be open to major life change on “It’s Alright,” trying to take the high road in past relationships on “The Easy Way,” the perspective that comes with age on “The Tide Falls Away,” and the Milgram obedience experiment that took place at Yale University in the ’60s on “Buzzer” (“a subject I have been obsessed with since reading about it when I was 18”).

Sara Watkins
    You could say that Sara Watkins’ solo debut has been a lifetime in the making. The 27-year-old singer-songwriter and fiddle player spent nearly two decades—all of her teenage and young adult life—as one-third of Nickel Creek, the Grammy Award–winning acoustic trio that used contemporary bluegrass as a starting point for its no-genre-barred sound. Along the way, she’s hinted at her desire to do a project of her own and even organized some exploratory sessions in Los Angeles about six years ago. Now, with Nickel Creek on indefinite hiatus, she is releasing her self-titled solo disc, recorded in Los Angeles and Nashville and produced by former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. It features an impressively wide range of backing players and old friends, including itinerant alt-country duo Gillian Welch and Dave Rawling, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench, Elvis Costello drummer Pete Thomas; fellow travelers from the bluegrass world like Tim O’Brien, Chris Eldridge, Ronnie McCoury and Rayna Gellert; and her Nickel Creek bandmates.
    Watkins’ debut has an air of easygoing virtuosity. She displays her skill as a multi-instrumentalist, playing the guitar and ukulele as well as the fiddle, and proves herself to be just as versatile, and breathtakingly mature, as a vocalist. Watkins segues gracefully from the lighthearted country and western swing of Jimmie Rodger’s “Any Old Time,” to the world-weariness and spiritual yearning of Norman Blake’s “Lord Won’t You Help Me,” to the romantic wistfulness of Jon Brion’s “Same Mistake.” Though she still considers herself a neophyte as a songwriter, her own work is as evocative as any of the material she’s chosen to cover. Her wordless fiddle tunes are exuberant, foot-stomping pieces, while the songs for which she wrote both music and lyrics have a heart-meltingly lovelorn quality. There’s honesty and empathy on tracks like the sweetly soulful “My Friend,” the brooding “Bygones,” and the rueful album closer, “Where Will You Be.” Watkins is newly, and very happily, married, but she knows how to channel the plaintive emotions of classic country and timeless pop in her own work.

More Information:
http://www.myspace.com/darwilliams
http://www.darwilliams.com
http://www.sarawatkins.com

Details

COST:

$27

BROUGHT TO YOU BY: The State Theatre
WEBSITE: http://www.thestatetheatre.org/Events/fullevent.php?id=703