Dar Williams
Album: Emerald
Label: Bread & Butter
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.darwilliams.com/

After 20 years with Razor & Tie, Williams is swimming in new waters. She crowd-funded her new album to ensure full creative control and is releasing it herself (via Bread & Butter in the UK). What hasn't changed is the quality and intelligence of the music.

Working with guests that include Richard Thompson, the Milk Carton Kids, Suzzy and Lucy Wainwright Roche and Eric Bazilian and Rob Hyman from the Hooters, the songs again highlight her compassion and insights, as well as her playfulness.

Inspired by a friend going through a separation, opening number, the keening, lap-steel accompanied Something To Get Through is a 'this too will pass' song about staying strong, even when it seems that the pain will never end. Thing are even more resolutely upbeat for FM Radio, one of those jubilant flurries she's so good at writing, here co-penned with Jill Sobule (who also plays guitar and provides harmonies), a celebratory tribute to growing up in the 70s in the spirit of Billy Joel's We Didn't Start The Fire that references, among other things, Sonny & Cher's divorce, Crawdaddy magazine, Jackson Browne, Lou Reed, Springsteen, Patty Hearst and Brandy, 1972's ubiquitous hit by Looking Glass.

The mood shifts for Empty Plane, a musically brooding, almost ethereal existential number born of a touring musician's life as she dreams of being alone, waiting to board, that I suspect has something to with being thankful to those who take care of us as we pass through the world's metaphorical airports. Then it's into the Wizard of Oz-referencing title cut, Richard Thompson on guitar for another journeying-themed song, about taking the time to slow down and enjoy the wonder and beauty of life around you.

Perhaps echoing the inspiration for the first number, a gently rolling tune with a bluesy acoustic guitar solo and Hyman on wurlitzer, Slippery Slope is a co-write and duet with Jim Lauderdale about pulling a teetering relationship back from the edge. Co-penned with the wonderfully named singer Angel Snow, the countrified Here Tonight is another playful number full of cascading chords and lyrics about romance blossoming (or rather blowing in on the wind) over a dinner date .

Featuring pianist Heidi Breyer, cellist Eugene Freisen and Will Ackerman on guitar, the Girl Of The World came about as a result of a trip to Honduras where a friend was making a documentary, Our Little Roses, about an all-girls orphanage in San Pedro, an introspective ballad about looking to find your place and coming together an building "a world of hearts".

An acoustic strum, the thematic thread of which began to take shape during the Occupy movement and which features the Milk Carton Kids on harmonies Mad River is a mid-tempo soulful song about growing up and seeing the our limitless horizons shrinking as reality and adulthood takes over, Williams noting on her website how she saw these young kids in Vermont who " had their passion, their rites of passage, honor, kindness, and bravery. But I felt like the world was going to swallow them whole."

The album's two covers follow. Suzzy Roche and daughter Lucy provide harmonies for Kat Goldman's Weight Of The World, a moving hymn of reassurance and another reminder that burdons will pass, the legendary David Mansfield playing guitar, violin and viola, before things get sprightlier for Johnny Appleseed, a song about protecting the environment and the voices of freedom, written by Joe Strummer, Paul Cook and Tymon Dogg and recorded for the Mescaleros' album Global A Go-Go, Williams' version more country guitar shaded than the folksier original with The Hooters contributing keyboards and hurdy gurdy.

The album closes in a simple guitar and piano setting with New York Is A Harbor, Williams vocally channeling her inner Janis Ian balladry on a homage to the Big Apple song that serves reminder that, while commercialisation and the corporate mentality may have priced the city out of the reach of "the dreamers with calloused hands" to which it was once a safe haven, the ideal of a community and the feeling of a neighbourhood of the spirit is something of which we should never lose sight. You'll forgive the obvious pun, but Emerald is a real gem.

Mike Davies