Dorothy Snowden Williams, better known to her immense fan base as Dar Williams, will be making her first appearance in Ames Saturday evening. The appearance has apparently been long-awaited, as fans sold out the 8 p.m. Maintenance Shop show weeks in advance.

Williams originally planned to become a playwright in Boston when she came across the opportunity to make it as a musician.

“There was an open mic scene in Boston that was just thriving,” she says. “You could go to an open mic at any time, any day of the week and pay your $2 to play your two songs. I very slowly started to write songs and do what I do now.”

Williams, no longer finding the need to pay to perform her songs, has been hailed by critics as one of the top folk rock artists of the day. Despite this much-appreciated praise, Williams herself believes she has fallen into an uncharted musical category, stemming from the varied musical genres she grew up with.

“I grew up with three different strings of music,” she says.

Influencing her music today, Williams cites the classical station her dad listened to — along with his collection of folk rock albums he owned, such as Simon and Garfunkel, Judy Collins and the Mamas and the Papas — intertwined with the pop music she heard growing up in the suburbs of New York.

“I think all three taught me how to love melodies and love all sorts of arrangements and orchestrations where pop arrangement sort of borders on classical arrangements,” she says. “I love people who cross between these areas and still manage to write really beautiful music.”

Williams calls on Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan and David Bowie as examples of musicians who brilliantly achieve that effect.

“I’m just a girl with an acoustic guitar, but when I go into the studio it’s very fun to arrange things to fit the narrative of the songs intelligently,” she says.

Williams recalls her first touch of fame, which came with Internet success and a radio hit from her second album, 1996’s “Mortal City.”

“Sometimes I felt very compared to other people and I felt a little of that scrutiny,” she says. “But I learned you can always just curl up on the couch and read a book. It was never something I couldn’t get away from to get perspective.”

Williams says in the beginning of her career, she felt the surges of fame, with waves of paranoia immediately following. She discovered a way to deal with her new-found prominence by defining the situation in her own terms.

“I realized that an album is an album and it does what it does,” Williams says. “Once it’s out in the world it does its own thing, and it doesn’t really matter how blonde I am or how old I am. It’s the songs that are doing the work.”

For her Ames show, she will be mixing the old with the new, adding in songs from her fourth album, “The Green World.” Williams says the album is about how people deal with chaos.

“It’s especially about the chaos that’s really good, and sometimes bad,” she says. “Mostly, if you have a lot of chaos and you don’t completely lose the wheel, it can be very positive.”

Williams will also debut a few songs from her album coming out in February, “The Beauty of the Rain.”

With Williams writing the majority of her songs, she finds it hard to comment on what inspires the lyrics, especially when listeners try to fit Williams’ life into her own lyrics.

“No one ever knows what they’re based on, same with any writer or author,” she says. “It just makes people sort of feel like they’re in your closet. People have huge imaginations, and they can imagine themselves being very many people.”

Williams admits that her big lyrical interests are in things that would make terrible songs, such as municipal recycling, what happens when things are recycled and how waste water is treated. However, she says she tries to incorporate a different interest into her lyrics.

“In my real life I find myself sort of drawn to nitty-gritty environmental questions, but in my songs it’s more how people live together in civilizations, one-on-one and within families, friendships and towns,” Williams says. “I try to keep these two interests pretty separate because I don’t want to voice my boring environmental concerns on everybody.”

Williams, unlike many other popular musicians, has yet to feel the pressure from her music managers to alter her work in order to make it appeal more to mainstream America.

“The music I play all sort of hinges on the fact that these were the songs people choose to hear at the outset,” she says.

Williams believes it would be counterproductive for her to modify her performance to appease others.

“It would be like trying to tell an interesting tree that’s grown up with a few gnarls and strange branches, and you know, strange flowers, to grow differently,” she says.

“I think we all sense that I just sort of need to follow those little voices in my head and everything will be okay.”