Dar Williams Rings in the Holidays With Return to Bell House

After a two-year COVID-induced hiatus, Dar Williams returned to The Bell House for her annual post-Christmas gift to Brooklyn on Dec. 29, 2022. (The tradition began in 2008 at Southpaw but has been hosted at Bell since 2010.)  The evening spanned her 30-year-plus recording career, with a healthy sampling of her current album, I’ll Meet You Here, occasionally accompanied by John Ragusa’s evocative flute and conch shell playing.

I’ll Meet You Here album cover

Whether singing about psychotherapy (“What Do You Hear in These Sounds?”), the environment (“Today and Every Day”), bigotry (“Little Town”) or a decaying suburban landscape (“Magical Thinking”), Dar Williams brings a refreshing tone of optimism to the proceedings. In the latter, for example, a young woman’s faith in the possibility of a renaissance in her hometown gradually comes to fruition.

Among our other favorite songs of the evening were “Beauty of the Rain” and “The Babysitter’s Here.” The latter is a fond remembrance of the cool young hippie chick from her childhood while the former equates love with rain – you can either enjoy how it falls or shut yourself inside and play it safe.

Dar Williams and Beth Nielson Chapman / photo by Chris Chin

A true highlight of the evening was when Beth Nielsen Chapman — who opened the evening with her own smart, energetic set — joined Dar on stage for a mini-set that included the biggest of Chapman’s many successes as a songwriter, “This Kiss” (a mega pop and country hit for Faith Hill), followed by a Dar Williams fan favorite, “Iowa.” Williams divided the audience into left and right sides to alternate on singing the choruses of “Iowa! — oh ooh oh” as the crowd waved their lighted cell phones to and fro.

Dar Williams On The Bell House Stage /photo by Chris Chin

Next, Chapman recited Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus” (the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty) as a prelude to Williams’ “New York Is a Harbor,” a beautiful and compelling song about the spirit and promise (sometimes unfulfilled) of the city, from Ellis Island to Harlem to the Stonewall Inn.

For her encore, Williams festooned herself with a tinsel boa to sing “When I Was a Boy,” in which she taps into her “tomboy” past to shed light on the limits and potential harmful effects of assigning gender roles – and the joy of defying them.

As musically fulfilling as the evening was, it left us wanting more and looking forward to next year’s Dar Williams holiday season show.