Dar Williams

“It’s a highway, filled with deep, exotic colors and beautiful delicate things as well as the perils that come from moving so fast,” says Dar Williams, describing modern life. On her 13th album, Hummingbird Highway, out September 12 on Righteous Babe Records, Williams celebrates the colors she glimpses from her vantage as a touring musician. “I was a kid from the suburbs who listened when her hippie teachers said to get out in the world,” Williams muses. Hummingbird Highway is the latest chapter in a richly unfolding story. Drawing on her experience as a playwright, Williams populates her latest album with nuanced characters that come alive in the space of a few minutes.

On the title track, Williams sings from the perspective of a child speaking to her peripatetic and sometimes struggling parent. Blooming columbines, china blue teapots, and cinnamon bark number among the “treasures” in her life, despite the “pirates” that she imagines populating her worldly parent’s life. “The pirates can be all sorts of things living inside and outside your head. The child, for better or worse, knows that there is joy, unpredictability, and instability on the home front. She’s rooting for the joy.”

Since 2013, Williams has been leading songwriting workshops where she teaches students to let songs find their own trajectories. While writing the breezy bossa nova “Tu Sais Le Printemps,” (single release 7/29/25) Williams questioned why she was writing a light, flirty song amidst many gloomy news stories. “I was having coffee with some of my fellow retreat leaders and Beth Nielsen Chapman, telling them about my ‘frilly’ song, and Beth said, ‘That's just what I want to hear right now!’ It was a nice moment to follow my own advice and let the song find its way.”

With help from Williams’ collaborators, the other songs found their paths as well. Mainly produced by Ken Rich at Brooklyn’s Grand Street recording (with two tracks produced by Dave Chalfant in Western Massachusetts), the Hummingbird Highway sessions were a microcosm of the interdependence that provided inspiration from inception to full production. These songs are ecosystems that thrive on co-creation. Daisy Mayhem brings roots-rock energy to the bluegrassy “Put the Coins on His Eyes,” while long time touring-mate and collaborator Bryn Roberts creates both the hooks and immersive sonic landscapes of every musical genre. Simpatico “studio magic” can be heard in the happy rowdiness of the Richard Thompson cover, “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight,” as well as in the contemplative “Sacred Mountain” where Williams wraps a halting melody around the narrator, a Buddhist who struggles to reconcile inward contemplation and political action. Through gray skies, snow pigeons, and petitions to stem industrial pollution, the character moves through shifting mindsets to work towards “what we see; what we breathe in time.”

Williams sees and breathes the way people connect with one another, as chronicled in what she calls her “take on urban planning,” What I Found in a Thousand Towns (Basic Books, 2017). “I traveled and watched how other people created these cool things like town-wide science fairs and hilarious celebrations of potatoes and chili, often going hand-in-hand with providing serious resources like food banks and free clinics,” she recalls. Along the way, she’s seen the devotion of strong unions (as in “Put the Coins On His Eyes”) and congressional reps alike. “Maryland, Maryland” was inspired by conversations with her friend, Rep. Jamie Raskin, about what a new state song would include. “In the end, my definition of a Maryland song was song about Jamie, who is a proud, patriotic son of the state.” As Williams continuously takes in the social landscapes of towns and cities, she has also taken them home, helping to start a thrift sale, chairing a community board, and helping to organize group sings in her New York hometown. “For someone who’s seen a lot of pavement and airports along with all the great places where I’ve played, it’s especially nice to come home,” she says.

As hummingbirds and folk singers fly, they gain perspective and not just distance. She finds that wise perch on “Olive Tree,” a single out on August 26. With production of stirring percussion and twinkling keys, she considers everything that’s led up to our current moment. Williams observes “all of these strangers and friends” talking about world events at parties and dinner gatherings and thinks back to all the iterations of those conversations from Aristotle on. In a moving verse, she conjures a time in 1913 when California Berkeley scientists planted an olive grove in the United States and imagined the generations who would meet in the olive trees’ shade for “over one thousand years.” When Williams promises “I’ll meet you here under an olive tree,” we all know that both she and we will, wherever and whenever we continue to foster olive trees and a human-scale, deeply-rooted democratic society.

Longtime listeners know that Williams and her music are always up for those kinds of conversations that glimpse the brightest colors, woven into the larger context of time. “As I've gotten older, I feel more comfortable holding a lot of different threads in my hand to create more complicated patterns. Time has given me a better ability to hold a bunch of colors and temperaments and see what happens, where they become interesting new stories and also where I need to stop and untangle the themes and characters. It's daunting, and I've learned that, you know, daunting is fine, just keep going.”

Seth Glier

The earth speaks to us in a myriad of ways — through ice cores, through uplift and erosion, through tree rings — languages we have the potential to restore our literacy in. Reconnecting with these quiet messages has set Seth Glier, an avid mushroom forager and a Grammy-nominated artist from Western Massachusetts, on a path of channeling nature’s longing for communion with humanity into song. His new album Everything is a collection of eight songs inviting us to imagine a future in which humans and the planet are re-aligned into mutual restoration.

Each song presents a practical climate solution with concrete optimism. “What if this is the beginning, not the beginning of the end,” the album opens with bristling energy and hope on “Rise,” an anthem about rewilding. “Finally Home” is a celebration of regenerative farming with driving doo wop vocal harmony. “Mammoth,” written from the perspective of a wooly mammoth being brought back to life from frozen DNA, invites us to consider the blip of human history against billions of years of evolution. The album’s guest stars Crys Matthews, Hayley Reardon, and Windborne elevate the record with surprise from the stark choir arrangement of “Birches” recorded a capella in an old church to “My Body Remembers,” a flowing meditation on the transmission of healing, EMDR & The Language of Trees. The album’s title track was inspired by an experience Seth had while foraging. “When I picked up the chantarelle mushroom and brought it towards my nose I first smelled sweet apricot and then my spine straightened suddenly. The feeling was like déjà vu. It was a first time, yet somewhere inside of me I had done this once before. I was reconnecting to a knowledge I had already known.” The album is an acknowledgement of the sacred connections that exist between all living things and is an active questioning of what might be possible collectively. Everything is a reminder that the future is something we always have an influence over.

Seth’s gifts are an innate curiosity and a fierce desire to connect with other people. His musical acumen provides him with a vehicle for both. He was worked as a cultural diplomat for the US State Department and collaborated with musicians in Ukraine, Mongolia, China, and Mexico. Seth has shared the bill with a diverse list of artists ranging from the likes of Ronnie Spector, James Taylor, Ani DiFranco, & Glen Campbell. As a producer, music director, or studio musician he has collaborated with Sophie B. Hawkins, Tom Rush, Antje Duvekot, Richard Shindell, Doctora Qingona, Dar Williams, Nick Carter, & Cyndi Lauper. Seth is a five-time Independent Music Award winner and received a Grammy nomination for his album The Next Right Thing. With a commitment to using songwriting as a tool for positive change, he has written with the students in Parkland, FL for the “Parkland Project,” cowritten with soldiers at Walter Reed, and is an advocate for autism awareness citing his autistic brother Jamie as his greatest non-musical-musical influence.