“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.”
