Singer-Songwriters Spin Two Kinds of Yarns

Touring together, Dar Williams and Ron Sexsmith form a Sane Poet Posse of singer-songwriters with an eloquent touch and a shared healthy-minded temperament that calls for lighting candles of hope and encouragement instead of cursing the darkness.

At the Coach House, headliner Williams struck a slightly dizzy, humorously free-associating persona. Between selections, she raced off on tangents in a breathless, clipped voice before circling back to set up her songs, most of which related youthful or psychic growing pains, with emphasis more on the growing than the pains.

A product of the Boston folk scene, Williams has moved into folk-rock with her latest album, “End of the Summer.” She strummed briskly, fronting a band of cello, drums and electric bass and guitar, and sang in a three-speed voice with gears for rushing, conversational narrative, lovely high-range soprano aria, and a lower, more muscular register for fervent anthemizing.

Her band’s rhythm section was feisty and only a little obtrusive, but overall the colors and textures of the music were cut blandly from standard contemporary folk-rock patterns. It seemed at times as if Williams was trying to find a place between her usual adventurous spot--in a folk left field of feminism and outrage at suburban middle class blandness and complacency--and Mary Chapin Carpenter’s more comfortable position in the middle of the mainstream.

Williams had a promising start with the stark sadness of “If I Wrote You,” a delicate lament. Yet little else in her 100-minute set connected so nakedly, not even her solo encore, “When I Was a Boy.” A rushed delivery diminished its memorable account of the inward toll exacted by strict gender roles.

The anthems “Are You out There” and “What Do You Hear in These Sounds” carried conviction as Williams sang about inspiring music as a signpost out of a lonely teenage wasteland, and, in “Sounds,” of psychotherapy as a mental machete cutting through the thickets of depression.

In a full-band setting, cascades of lyrics rushed by too quickly to be absorbed fully. The arrangements lacked distinctive hues that might have enhanced the impact of her words.

The highlight of Williams’ set was a guest turn by Sexsmith on his own song, “Speaking With the Angel.” It’s a luminous piece that captures the weight and wonder of parenting: an all-too-fallible adult in charge of a perfectly magical but completely malleable little being.

There’s something almost magical in Sexsmith’s ability to deal insightfully with large, complex swaths of human experience in a few simply stated verses. And there’s something appealing about the humility and grace with which he does it. Sexsmith is an artist who never overreaches, never uses a song as an excuse for a star turn or a grand gesture. Telling the experience and getting it right are his only concerns.

The Canadian singer’s 30-minute solo-acoustic set hinged on whether he could control timbre and intonation as he sang in a highly stylized, falsetto-reaching voice supported by his own skillful, finger-picked guitar.

It was a high-wire act, and when he was off, Sexsmith sounded creaky and subpar. But most of the time he was on, his delicate vibrato fluttering like a sad, lovely, muted trumpet, conveying the inwardness of a Nick Drake along with the adventurousness of Elvis Costello (one of Sexsmith’s biggest fans).

Sexsmith’s two albums for a successful major label, Interscope, have sold a combined 23,000 copies in the United States, according to the SoundScan monitoring service--about a tenth as many as Williams’ three albums for a tiny independent, Razor & Tie.

In the singer-songwriter derby these days, it’s a woman’s, woman’s, woman’s world, and Sexsmith might have better luck taking a shot as Ron Transsexmith. Yet even that wouldn’t address the problem of being subtle and inward, an artistic temperament not easily processed through the selling machinery. At the Coach House, though, an appreciative audience, including a few of his own partisans, was sold on Sexsmith’s performance.