Dar Williams – My Better Self

Dar Williams could be the most normal singer-songwriter to emerge from folk music in the last decade. That normality has worked in her favor: She stands out like a relatively uninjured thumb from the dogmatically angry and/or ethereally unthinking women, and she stands well apart from the Dave Matthews-besotted men.

As the brightness of her sixth album, My Better Self, makes clear, Williams has rarely, if ever, mistaken normality — or its relevant attendant, artistic consistency — for monotony. She modifies her musical context by finally taking her crack touring band into the studio, by threading a few covers in among her originals, and by inviting guests as varied as power-pop legend Marshall Crenshaw and folk icon Patty Larkin.

Such quotidian changes ripple through My Better Self the way dropped pebbles send concentric waves across water. With her humbly beautiful and breezily wide-ranging voice, Williams pulls off feats her showier peers cannot, such as the delicately depicted political commentary of “Empire” and the simultaneously funny and observant “Teen For God”.

She also draws surprises from the other participants. Soulive provides admirably restrained backing on the bluesy “Two Sides Of The River”; Ani DiFranco sings a ghostly counterpoint on an almost spiritual take of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”; and Crenshaw deftly (and fortunately) avoids imitating Neil Young on a sparkling version of Young’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”.

My Better Self flows smoothly, with a simplicity more lulling than deceptive. It’s typically auspicious work from Williams, who lights up the mind and soul when supposedly brighter, stranger talents have dimmed.