A No-Holds Bard Lesson for Williams

The Bible famously advises that as ye sow, so shall ye reap. It doesn’t, however, mention how much time might elapse between the sowing and the reaping.

Singer-songwriter Dar Williams--who plays two shows in Southern California this weekend--discovered that it can be a decade or more from planting season to harvest. The harvest, in her case, was a quantum leap in self-understanding yielded while working on her fourth album, “The Green World.”

“Something happened--I don’t know what--but there was a whole lot of stuff I read 10 years ago when I was in college and really depressed, and it’s all come back to me 10 years later,” says the 33-year-old Williams.

College for her was Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where she majored in religion and theater. Thus it is Shakespeare, not gardening or ecology, to which her new album’s title alludes.

‘All Those Things I Had Read Kept Coming Back’

In Shakespeare, there are two arenas where human drama and growth occur. The “green world” is the wild, untamed part of the psyche often represented by forests in the Bard’s plays. Its counterpart, the “closed world,” is civilization or the safely ordered, conscious mind.

“I was this little scattered 20-year-old reading about brilliant spiritual figures and wishing I could be as spiritually disciplined as they were. . . . And not just as disciplined or as smart, but also as godly and perfect,” says the New York-born, Boston-bred musician.

“Looking into the mirror and seeing something horrific, I got horribly depressed,” she says. “But 10 years later, you grow up and realize that’s not the point: to become spiritually perfect. . . . The point was to have fallen and then be able to reconcile that.

“So all those things I had read kept coming back in my head, and they’re all over this album: reconciliation, new perspectives and curiosity. I feel like now I’m engaged with life much more realistically.”

Williams’ literate, idea-packed songs have put her at the forefront of new-generation singer-songwriters. Even so, “The Green World” is winning praise as an artistic breakthrough. Some of her expansive lyrics have become more economical, and her songs are fleshed out with rich musical textures not commonly associated with the genre.

The album opens with an instrumental introduction to “Playing to the Firmament” that musically seems to bridge the green world with the closed world, a sort of techno-Celtic sound.

“I feel real loyalty to making music that is on its own terms, that seeks to communicate something,” she says. “At the same time, coming from a theater background, I love all production, I love the theatricality of textures. . . . This time we had longer to work on it and really got to put a lot of nuances in.”

In “What Do You Love More Than Love” she yearns to understand the deep needs behind ego-centered love in a song inspired by a trip to Bhutan, near Tibet. Another song that harks back to her days at Wesleyan, “I Won’t Be Your Yoko Ono,” is one of the few pop songs about Ono not written by John Lennon.

“She was the hero when I was in college for her performance art,” Williams says. “Women like Yoko, Meredith Monk and Nina Hagen.”

‘People Come to Dance’ as Well as to Think

Though she’s grateful for a following that’s as intensely loyal as it is intensely interested in her lyrics--”One can really argue that my career is born out of people going to school and playing one of my albums to everyone on their dorm hall,” she notes--Williams is equally pleased at the response to her current full-band tour.

“A few years ago we were playing a rock club and it basically turned into a listening room--people sat on the floor, somebody brought a plant, somebody else brought a violin and one woman brought her dinner.

“Now,” she says, barely masking her pride, “people come to dance and participate the way they would at a real live rock show.”

* Dar Williams, Saturday at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. 8 p.m. $18.50 and $20.50. (949) 496-8930. Also Sunday at the Henry Fonda Theatre, 6126 Hollywood Blvd., 8 p.m. $26. (323) 480-3232.