Dar Williams with special guest Ruth Theodore

“It’s a highway, filled with deep, exotic colors and beautiful delicate things as well as the perils that come from moving so fast,” says Dar Williams, describing modern life. On her 13th album, Hummingbird Highway, out September 12 on Righteous Babe Records, Williams celebrates the colors she glimpses from her vantage as a touring musician. “I was a kid from the suburbs who listened when her hippie teachers said to get out in the world,” Williams muses. Hummingbird Highway is the latest chapter in a richly unfolding story. Drawing on her experience as a playwright, Williams populates her latest album with nuanced characters that come alive in the space of a few minutes. On the title track, Williams sings from the perspective of a child speaking to her peripatetic and sometimes struggling parent. Blooming columbines, china blue teapots, and cinnamon bark number among the “treasures” in her life, despite the “pirates” that she imagines populating her worldly parent’s life. “The pirates can be all sorts of things living inside and outside your head. The child, for better or worse, knows that there is joy, unpredictability, and instability on the home front. She’s rooting for the joy.”

Longtime listeners know that Williams and her music are always up for those kinds of conversations that glimpse the brightest colors, woven into the larger context of time. “As I’ve gotten older, I feel more comfortable holding a lot of different threads in my hand to create more complicated patterns. Time has given me a better ability to hold a bunch of colors and temperaments and see what happens, where they become interesting new stories and also where I need to stop and untangle the themes and characters. It’s daunting, and I’ve learned that, you know, daunting is fine, just keep going.”