By Denny Dyroff, Entertainment Editor, The Times
Dar Williams
This area has many attractive outdoor summer concert series.
One of the premier ones – one filled with name acts – is the 2026 Concerts Under the Stars series in King of Prussia, which is now in its 40th season.
One of the highlights will be provided by Dar Williams this weekend.
Presented and produced by Rising Sun Presents!, the summer-long series will again take place at the scenic Upper Merion Township Building Park (175 West Valley Forge Road, King of Prussia, www.concertsunderthestarskop.com) – except for this weekend.
This week, the series will start with a pair of shows at Upper Merion Township Building Park — “An Evening With Béla Fleck, Edmar Castañeda and Antonio Sanchez Trio” on June 25 and Tortoise on June 26.
These are the only three concerts at this venue and together they make for a blockbuster weekend.
The main event– the River Roads Music Festival — takes place on June 27 at Heuser Park, which is located at 694 West Beidler Road in King of Prussia).
The big show is the 2026 River Roads Music Festival featuring Dar Williams, 10,000 Maniacs and Billy Bragg.
The festival, which gets underway at 1:15 p.m., also features sets by Shawn Colvin, Susan Werner, Miko Marks and Amythyst Kiah.
“Rising Sun is great,” said Williams. “They know the area and the lineups they have for shows is always excellent.”
Williams, who is a longtime resident of the Hudson Valley, has been a fan favorite in the Philadelphia area for decades. She is the founder of the River Roads Music Festival.
Williams posted this statement — “The River Roads Festival has been a wonderful new home for my music and musical friends, my deep love for American rivers, and alliances with good organizations that keep our rivers clean and healthy. The Philly area, particularly King of Prussia, is my first home, the first place that welcomed me thirty years ago, and River Roads will be there soon.”
This weekend’s festival will be the fourth annual stagging of the well-received event.
“The first two River Roads Festivals were held in western Massachusetts,” said Williams, during a phone interview Wednesday afternoon from her home in the Hudson Valley.
“That’s my old stomping grounds. We had the first two festivals there in 2023 and 2024. It was a good home base.”
Two years ago, Williams was in Chester County — sharing the bill with Bruce Cockburn at the Colonial Theatre in Phoenixville.
Back then, Williams was out on a support tour – but not a tour in support of a new album.
Williams was touring in support of a newly released book, “How To Write A Song That Matters,” which was released via Hachette Books.
She was also on the road playing her music at venues around the East Coast.
This summer, Williams has three concerts slated for July in Maine, New York and Massachusetts.
She also has few songwriting retreats – July 6-10 and August 3-7 at the Guest House in Chester, Connecticut.
“I have three songwriting retreats scheduled for this year,” said Williams. “Two are in the summer and there are still a few spots open.”
In between her festival shows in 2025 and 2026, Williams put out a new album. “Hummingbird Highway,” which was produced by Ken Rich, was released September 12, 2025, on Righteous Babe Records.
According to Williams, “It’s a highway, filled with deep, exotic colors and beautiful delicate things as well as the perils that come from moving so fast.
“I was a kid from the suburbs who listened when her hippie teachers said to get out in the world.”
Area fans will have the opportunity to hear for the first time many of the songs from “Hummingbird Highway” performed live.
“I did a four-month album release tour as a trio with Seth Glier, a singer/songwriter who plays keys and guitar, and Caitlin Thomas, who sings and plays electric guitar and cello,” said Williams.
“I’m performing with the same trio this weekend. I didn’t do a Philly show on the album release tour, so I’ll have a lot of the new songs in this weekend’s set.”
The album was recorded and mixed by Rich at Grand Street Recording in Brooklyn, New York and mastered by Alan Douches.
“Put the Coins” was produced by David Chalfant at Norfolk Studios in Northampton, Massachusetts, and “What Bird Did You See” was co-produced by Rich and Chalfant at Grand Street Recording and Norfolk Studios.
Grand Street Recording, which is located in Williamsburg and owned by Rich, is billed as, “the most creative recording environment in Brooklyn.”
“It’s a basement studio where everybody keeps their gear,” said Williams. “It’s amazing with walls of guitars and other instruments.
“We recorded everything digitally. We also did a couple tracks with David Chalfont at a studio in Northampton, Massachusetts.”
One of the many artists who has recorded albums at Grand Street Recording is Ani DiFranco.
In April 2025, Williams signed a recording deal with Righteous Babe Records – a label that is owned by DiFranco.
Williams’ history with DiFranco runs many years deep — from performing together in their early years at Canadian and U.S. folk festivals to collaborating on recordings such as “Comfortably Numb” on Williams’ album “My Better Self.”
They have met on many stages and share similar passions for their audiences, the causes they embrace, and, of course, the music that brings it all together.
According to DiFranco, “Dar and I go back a lot of decades, and I’m so pleased to be able to offer her and her music shelter now, in this stormy world. We celebrate and welcome Dar into the Righteous Babe fold!”
Williams agrees, “This is such an important time to be a part of a musical community that stands with a larger community. I’m thrilled and grateful to be joining Ani in this world she has built.”
Williams entered the recording process with 11 songs and emerged with 10 for inclusion in the album.
“There is definitely a theme,” said Williams. “It is about civilization – how we live and create beautiful things – how do we really do it.
“One of the songs – ‘Maryland, Maryland’ – deals with (Maryland congressman) Jamie Raskin. It has a lot to do with January 6. It’s a state song for Maryland. Jamie Raskin is my friend – and my hero.”
Williams, who has recorded more than 20 albums, released her previous album, “I’ll Meet You Here,” in October 2021 on BMG’s Renew label. Her most recent album prior to this was “Emerald,” which came out in 2015.
“There was a gap between albums because I did a book,” said Williams, a well-respected speaker/author/singer-songwriter.
“After I released ‘Emerald’ in 2015, I stopped writing songs for a while. I didn’t start writing songs again until 2017. Then, I recorded ‘I’ll Meet You Here’ in 2019.
“I was going to release it in 2020. But because of the pandemic, I moved the entire release up a year. It was just a year off and now it’s really full out.”
Williams also spends time as a writer.
“I’m working on a novel,” said Williams. “I’ve also been writing songs. I just taught a college course at Wesleyan University.
“Teaching at a university was great. I’ve also done some songwriting retreats and that’s been great too. I like to have different avenues rather than just recording and touring.”
One of those avenues has been writing books.
Williams published two young-adult novels with Scholastic in the mid-2000s, along with a green blog for Huffpost, before she tackled her urban-planning study, published in 2017 – “What I Found in a Thousand Towns: A Traveling Musician’s Guide to Rebuilding America’s Communities — One Coffee Shop, Dog Run & Open-Mike Night at a Time.”
In that book, Williams muses on why some towns flourish while others fail, examining elements from the significance of history and nature to the uniting power of public spaces and food. Drawing on her own travels and the work of urban theorists, Williams offers real solutions to rebuild declining communities.
“What I Found in a Thousand Towns” is more than a love letter to America’s small towns, it’s a deeply personal and hopeful message about the potential of America’s lively and resilient communities.
“It’s not a memoir,” said Williams. “It’s what I had seen from tours in my travels at towns that had found a way to be resilient – hometown pride and a world welcome. I followed that thread and tried to figure out what it was.
“I call it ‘positive proximity’ – a state of being in a town where people know that living side-by-side is beneficial…that the more they follow that proximity, the better life can be.
“I wrote about how to build positive proximity, how to maintain the benefits of positive proximity and how to sustain positive proximity.”
In her book, Williams looks at two area towns – Phoenixville and Wilmington.
“The Phoenixville chapter is about what happens when a town digs into its history and builds on that,” said Williams. “It is a town that has become a vibrant place because of that.
“The Wilmington chapter is about waterfronts – about how towns can come back to life by developing their waterfront areas with parks, restaurants and public spaces.”
Williams headed in an entirely different direction on her new book, “How To Write A Song That Matters.”
“I wanted to write a book that was written by a performing songwriter,” said Williams. “There is a broad and magical way that songs live in the world. Songs bring people back to times in their lives with new eyes.”
Video link for Dar Williams – https://youtu.be/4-0tPKPbypk.
Video link for River Roads Music Festival — https://youtu.be/AS5JeixhYzg?si=2Or0D4jIckBms6A8
Tickets are $81.25 for adults (ages 13 and older),
$56.41 for kids and $184.75 for “Premium General Admission.”
The 2026 Concerts Under the Stars series has a selection of attractive shows on its schedule for next month including Molly Tuttle and Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country on July 2, “Dead, White & Blue featuring Splintered Sunlight” on July 3 and The Disco Biscuits on July 25 and 26.
John Wood Band’
Music fans who check out the John Wood Band’s concert in Philly on June 27 might just find themselves in a position a few years from now of saying – “I saw that band when…”
The band from Wilmington, North Carolina, is past its embryonic stage and its show Saturday night at Silk City (Spring Garden Street, Philadelphia, www.silkcityphilly.com) is a natural step forward.
The John Wood Band is a dynamic six-piece band from Wilmington, North Carolina – a band that is based in the South with a strong local connection.
Founded by singer-songwriter John Wood, the band formed in 2025 following Wood’s solo acoustic performance opening for Winyah and Harvey Street.
Half of the band is from North Carolina, but its founder is from the Atlantic City area. Wood is from Linwood, New Jersey and is a graduate of Mainland Regional High.
Wood now attends University of North Carolina Wilmington as a criminology major with a minor in pre-law. He and his bandmates all belong to the FIJI fraternity at UNCW.
Phi Gamma Delta (ΦΓΔ), commonly known as Phi Gam and sometimes written as FIJI, is a North American social fraternity with active chapters across the United States and Canada.
“The unofficial motto for FIJI at UNCW is ‘surf, skate, music,’” said Wood. “It’s like Southern California on the East Coast.”
The John Wood Band has been tapping the music part of the “motto.”
The band features Wood on guitars and vocals, Brody Folkers (Sarasota, Florida) on lead guitar, TJ Roy (St. Thomas, Virgin Islands) on saxophone, Grant Harward (Raleigh, N.C.) on keys, Jay Eades (Mount Airy, N.C.) on bass, and Caleb Dulin (Greenville, N.C.) on drums.
Wood is a singer-songwriter who creates a soulful blend of folk, rock, and pop music. Picking up the guitar at 15, Wood got his start playing local bars around South Jersey while writing and recording songs.
Wood’s musical goal is to blend the elements of his diverse influences while establishing an original sound – and to provide an electric live show with the six-piece JWB.
Prior to touring together, the band members were frat brothers with complementary musical tastes.
“I had been playing solo shows for four or five years and decided to put a group together,” said Wood. “I was doing shows and I wanted a full band. So, I started the band in September 2025.
“We have a wide range of influences – Allman Brothers, John Mayer, Albert King, Red Hot Chili Peppers, big jam band sound. Other big influences are the Tedeschi Trucks Band, Billy Joel, Zac Brown Band and the Velvet Underground.
“We were just in the studio in early May. We were recording with producer Wolfgang Zimmerman at The Space, his studio in Charleston, South Carolina.
“Wolfgang is a really good producer. He wanted to help us get our sound together more – to work more as a band. We recorded three tracks there.
“Our first single is ‘Just A Little Longer,’ which came out last week. The other two – ‘Into the Light’ and ‘Florida Rain’ – will come out later this summer.
“We’ll have an EP out later this year and then release our first album next year.
“We’ve been on tour all summer – all around the East Coast –and we’re going to keep it going. We’ll have concerts this summer in California and at three venues in Colorado.”
Surprisingly, the John Wood Band has never played a venue in the Delaware Valley.
“This show at Silk City on Saturday night will be our first time to play Philly,” said Wood. “We’re really looking forward t it.”
Video link for the John Wood Band – https://youtu.be/PZgtOzU_riU?si=siuaCmEMC2xEY0cR.
The show at Silk City on June 27, which also features The Bad Solstice, will start at 8 p.m.
Tickets are $20.66.
The outdoor concert schedule starts to shift into a higher gear this weekend.
The Eagleview Town Center (Wharton Boulevard, Exton, www.ineagleview.com) will present its Summer Concert Series every Tuesday now through August.
On June 30, Eagleview will host LeCompt with special guest Lia Menaker on June 30, Handsome Jack and Canyon Lights on July 7,
Sophie Gault and Lazy Villains on July 14, Polyrhythmics featuring Adryon de León with special guest Julia Miralles on July 21 and The Legwarmers on July 28.
Uptown! Knauer Performing Arts Center (226 North High Street, West Chester, www.uptownwestchester.org) hosts Forever Donna on June 26 and Social Sessions On The Lawn on June 27 featuring performances by Cumberland County, Swift Technique, and The Fractals.
It’s the best of two worlds at Kennett Flash (102 Sycamore Alley, Kennett Square, 484-732-8295, http://www.kennettflash.org).
Kennett Flash has the ability to stage both indoor and outdoor concerts. Obviously, the indoor shows are held at the club on Sycamore Alley.
The Kennett Flash Rooftop Concert series is presented outside on the top floor of the Kennett Square Parking Garage located at 100-198 East Linden Street in Kennett Square.
The indoor shows this weekend are Joe Kenney Band on June 25 and Lexis Shardé on June 26.
On June 27, there will be a Rooftop Show featuring Kid Charlemagne.
Bryn Mawr Twilight Concerts (9 South Bryn Mawr Avenue, Bryn Mawr, brynmawrtwilightconcerts.com) will present “Mihali with John Kadlecik: Solo Acousti’Lectric” on June 28.
On June 25, Jamey’s House of Music (32 South Lansdowne Avenue, Lansdowne, www.jameyshouseofmusic.com) will host A.C. Steel & The Perpetrators followed by Joon Shain with Bob Beach on June 26, Ty Stephens and (the) Souljaazz on June 27 and Jamey’s Blues Union on June 28.
Elkton Music Hall (107 North Street, Elkton, Maryland, www.elktonmusichall.com) hosts “Bit Brigade – “Mega Man X” w/ Super Guitar Bros.” on June 25, “Live Dead & Brothers: Grateful Dead & Allman Bros.” on June 26 and Sally Baby’s Silver Dollars on June 27.
