JustArts: When you are at Wesleyan were you playing there often? How did you get started?Williams: I was a theater and religion major - actually I was a religion major first, and then I became a theater major after that - and then after college, I wanted to be a playwright. I soon learned that if you wanted to be a playwright you had to either be coming out of New York, or you have to have some sort of affiliation with academia, like the Brandeis program, actually - I was looking at that eventually. It was really hard to get anything on its feet theatrically and so in the meantime I was working as a stage manager at the Opera Company of Boston, and I realized that I missed singing. I discovered that unlike playwriting, you had an instant format for honing your skills, with a lot of feedback, which was, you know, you pay $2, and sing two songs at the open mic. At the urging and good encouragement of my voice teacher I did that, and then it all just went from there. So suddenly, my life just became a lot more about music, and here I am.

justArts: So when did you learn to play guitar? Or did you really get into it after college?

Williams: No, everything that I know basically stems from what I learned between the ages of nine and 12. So, needless to say, I'm a big advocate of people taking instrument lessons.

justArts: Are you going to make your kids take instrument lessons, if you have kids?

Williams: Yeah, I'm actually back taking guitar lessons and getting some music theory, and I'm amazed. I can tell how hard it is to absorb stuff, because it's a language - it's a mathematical language. I was just writing to my sister and saying that I would encourage her to get an instrument for her son, and she said "well, great . but he's already broken a guitar and a violin." So, so far he hasn't played them. So yeah, that would be something I encourage all kids to do, but it's also, music is just good for kids. They take to it, and it makes their lives more interesting and actually makes education easier, or so the studies say.

justArts: Do you think your music, or any music, can affect some kind of social change?

Williams: Yeah, I do. You know, I'm a Democrat, a very green leaning Democrat, and I was thinking, what is the Democratic Party? And I thought, we're the civilization builders, and I think Republicans probably believe that civilization can be built by the private sector only. Fair enough, but I believe civilizations are built very slowly and through this slow building of infrastructure, and the slow connections of cultures within cultures. It's all we have to connect us together, these are the strings that connect us together and keep us from doing terrible things to one another. And, when terrible things are done, they remind us of our humanity so that we don't retaliate in kind, and I do believe in that, that it keeps a certain amount of peace in the world, to have the proliferation of culture and also the remembrance of shared culture. I saw the signs for Leonard Bernstein when I was coming in . his involvement in the birth of Israel, and Mark Chagall coming over and creating the windows, it's a strong culture and that's a country that's only 54 years old and has an enormous cultural outpouring and outreach. Joan Baez did a concert in the former Czechoslovakia, and Vaclav Havel said that her concert was one of the factors in the Velvet Revolution being a non-violent revolution. So I think it's huge, and I also think it keeps people aware and awake that their humanity counts, which counters a real consumerist, alienating, homogenous, society. It is also a vehicle for some artists to give the voiceless a voice, outside of the music itself.

justArts: How did touring with String Cheese Incident go?

Williams: It was very, very fun.

justArts: Were they different than the normal people you tour with?

Williams: Well, a lot of the people that I've worked with have been other singer/songwriters, so the emphasis on the lyrics, and the emphasis on sort of, the neurosis of getting through a day or whatever, you know that's sort of the fodder for songwriters - there's a kind of a Seinfeld quality to it. So String Cheese would start to practice about two songs into my show, and that was really lovely. I mean, how serious they were about their music and how they worked and what an incredible phenomenon they create on stage, but it was about the music - their lyrics are great - but it was like such an interesting thing to get with people who were so into music.

justArts: I know you started out in Boston and Cambridge playing coffeehouses and stuff. How did that treat you? Do you wish you were back on that level again, or not at all?

Williams: I'm really glad it happened, and I'm glad it created the career that it's created because it's what Scott Alarik called an audience-based career as opposed to an industry-based career. I got to find out who I was to my peers through coffeehouses, and who invited me to play, and when I got better, I got invited to do more gigs. When I finally wrote "The Honesty Room" it opened up the door of my career. It was nice to believe that the success of what I was doing was based on my writing the things that people wanted to hear, as opposed to a successful boob job, or a successful masquerade of some kind.

justArts: Did you like it when you were in the Boston area?

Williams: It was great, I lived in Somerville, I lived on Willow Ave. ... Everything was right there, I could walk to Cambridge to Harvard Square, and I had a ritual of playwriting at the Coffee Connection - which is now probably Starbucks. And they didn't have a bathroom in this place - it was in the Garage in Harvard Square - and so basically I would just write until I had to pee so badly that I had to go. And then I would start to walk home and stop and go to the bathroom at the Harvard Science Center and then I would be walking home, and during that walk home is when I would start to write songs. And that was kind of a big ritual.

justArts: Are you working on anything now?

Williams: I have an album in the can, but it is coming out in February.