Dar Williams

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She was literary and funny, feminist and poetic, all in one short set — sometimes in one song. I still remember what she played that night. She won us over right away with "When I Was a Boy," about an ex-tomboy's nostalgia as she feels adult womanhood constraining her. "The Baby-Sitter's Here" viewed the age gap in reverse, through the eyes of a young girl idolizing her teenage hippie baby-sitter. "February" evoked a dying relationship with a metaphor of endless winter, and "Alleluia" introduced us to punk-rock teen angels who think heaven is just a boring high school.

Sure, DiFranco fans were naturally willing to give another female singer a chance, but we hadn't expected another major talent, so different from the headliner. Williams, whose sweet soprano sounded like intricate paintings full of emotional colors, was giving folk music new vitality.

Nine years and four more albums later, Williams is still a fresh voice, inspired by folk traditions but not stuck in them. She's avoided the singer-songwriter trap of living off the angst-filled love song and the angry protest song. She doesn't write about romance as often as she does about friendship, tense family ties, and an acutely viewed inner life, and one measure of her talent is that her political songs are among her most poetic. I could say, for instance, that "When I Was a Boy" is about how gender roles rob us of our full selves, but that sounds like rhetoric, and it misses how strongly we feel her loss after the song's vulnerable adult gives way to the resilient kid.