By Tom Crenshaw, tom@rockom.net
I first saw Dar Williams perform in 1996 in Charlotte, NC where she was opening for Joan Baez who had taken the young folksinger under her wing. Dar had just released her second album (and her first for Razor & Tie Records, which she still calls home) entitled Mortal City and was being introduced to the country and to life on the road by Baez. The thing that struck me about Dar then was how this young, tiny woman could command the stage with a just few well chosen stories between songs. In them, she demonstrated her intelligence and understanding of what it meant to be an entertainer and artist. Dar also sang with an angelic, comforting tone and clarity that grabbed me instantly.
Dar’s prodigious command of words and lyrics are more than melodic poetry; they are her means of creating stories set within stories. Initially those stories are like eavesdropping in on strangers' lives, only to later discover she’s actually singing about our own lives. With sometimes haunting, sometimes hilarious and endearing metaphors and paradoxes, Dar’s creations are wrought using simple words that are skillfully and pithily weaved together, dotingly cradled in the crisp sound of her acoustic guitar.
Dar was brought up by liberal parents in Chappaqua, NY and majored in religion at Wesleyan University. After graduation Dar spent the next 10 years living in the flourishing artistic community of Northampton, MA, where she made the rounds of the local coffeehouse scene performing her music. In 1993 Dar released her debut album, The Honesty Room and then signed with Razor & Tie Entertainment in 1995. Joan Baez deemed Dar’s songs so endearing that she personally re-recorded several of them for her own albums.
Dar has supported various causes, founded the Snowden Environmental Trust and has lent her voice in many benefit concerts. For example, she performed a benefit show at Alcatraz with Joan Baez and the Indigo Girls for Bread and Roses - a group reaching out to those isolated in institutions such as nursing homes, hospitals and even prisons.
Such great singer-songwriters as John Prine, Cliff Eberhardt, Richard Shindell, Ani DiFranco and others have shown up on Dar's albums throughout her 15 year career. She has released one live album - Out There Live (2001), six previous studio albums - The Honesty Room (1993), Mortal City (1996), End of the Summer (1997), The Green World (2000), The Beauty of the Rain (2003), and My Better Self (2005), and one live DVD - Live at Bearsville Theater (2007). Promised Land is Dar’s latest release (2008) and is a collection of originals and covers produced by Grammy-nominated producer Brad Wood.
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RockOm: You say that with your latest album, Promised Land, you strived to, “Pare the stories down to their core,” and that, “This is hard to do… it takes a lot of knowledge to get to the point where you can say what you need to say; no more, no less.” Has this always been the goal of yours, a culmination of sorts that you’ve been working towards?
Dar Williams: That’s a good question. It’s always been the goal. Especially after my first albums came out and people were listening to them saying that I had a lot of lyrics. I thought it would be great to let the music do what it does best. You’ve got the music there to go hand in hand with the words.
RockOm: Brad Wood, your producer on Promised Land, is noted for working with Liz Phair, Pete Yorn, Ben Lee and Smashing Pumpkins. Are you content and comfortable with the urgency as well as the space Brad helped to instill in the overall sound?
Dar Williams: Yeah. The drummer that he used [Travis McNabb from Better Than Ezra] is from New Orleans. There’s a lot of give in his playing, a lot of swing in it. That seemed to set the tone for the whole album. There wasn’t anything that hit hard that didn’t also have a lot of intelligence and sensitivity. I was fine with that.
RockOm: Brad Wood mentioned that it seemed like a good time, career-wise, for you to make a change. Why is that? Why now and what did this change, this direction you took with Promised Land, teach you as an artist?
Dar Williams: I think every album is a jump-off point. I had just worked with Stewart Lerman, whom I really loved, for three albums. I think it was an organic moment. I’m not very good at deciding what… [pause] one does not know what one’s career needs. We brought in Brad and I was happy about that. Brad had people to bring in that he works with and I said yes to that even though there are people that I work with and that I trust. Brad said, "Trust me. If you trust me as a producer, trust the group, I’ll bring in." It was a very positive experience. I don’t think he or I really know what my career needs [laughs] or doesn’t. It seems to have done good things, so I guess, in retrospect, it was alright and a good choice.
RockOm: The guest musicians you had playing with you on the album - Susanne Vega, Marshall Crenshaw and the others - are very impressive. It had to have given you a spark, a jolt to make the record sound as great as it did.
Dar Williams: It was an excellent experience. Frankly, it’s just like any job. The more talented people you encounter, the better it is for you and whatever project you’re working on. This was no exception [laughs] for sure.
RockOm: You were a religion major at Wesleyan University, and you have a myriad of songs dealing with matters of faith and spirituality. Have you been able to adequately express your ideas of God, the Divine, or whatever you want to call it, to the point that you’re comfortable you’ve expressed everything you believe in now?
Dar Williams: I think a lot of faith has to do with what you don’t say and know - so no, I doubt that I have and doubt that I want to. I have a faith in telling stories that are clear and that feel important to me and that’s it. Those are decisions I make with my heart as well as my mind and I think that both of those are in good shape. I had a voice teacher who had a plaque up that said, ‘Don’t work on your goal. Work on your practice.’ The practice for me is to listen to things that would probably be deemed really playful and might even seem irrelevant - sort of everyday voices that meet in my mind that I see poetically. I think that seeing the world poetically is really important to the large picture. In terms of religion I’m not affiliated with one, but I have been. I was a Quaker for a long time and then, when I was in college, I was a Buddhist, which is very similar. I’ve studied a lot of religions and it brought me to a place of appreciating that people have different things that get them through the day.
RockOm: Do you feel that at one time your being an atheist helps you now with your faith?
Dar Williams: You know what… it’s interesting. I mean there’s one song I don’t think I’ll write because it looks at the issue so directly that it’s too hard to deal with poetically. For a long time I’ve found myself working on a song called, “I Was Listening But Now I’ve Heard.” In the religions that I was involved with, I was listening. There’s a big difference between listening for a faith in God and belief. I just think the funny thing is… I think my life is… I just laugh a lot at these funny paradoxes and one of them is that at my most religious, I think I believed the least. At the time I believed the least, I woke up one morning and I believed. I assumed that that meant that I needed to go to a church but it turned out to be the opposite. It’s a real mystery in my life why I woke up and had faith and never lost it. It didn’t seem to have any companion in a religious community or any of the religions I studied or followed.
RockOm: Which song that you perform best connects individuals or is the most profound for you?
Dar Williams: [long pause] The song “After All." I started to write it as an explanation of coming out of depression, being depressed - which I describe as feeling like a winter machine, like an endless winter machine and then what it feels like to come out of it and what the footholds were, you know, coming up from rock bottom. One of them was finding out more truth about the people in my life. Really asking them to not just show me the stories they had chosen to tell me but also things that they might think were unnecessary in terms of some of their trials - i.e. my parents. Then you take the next step and you say, I’m also asking you to say what you need to say to me if you’re angry, if I need to apologize, if you’re disappointed or if you love me or anything.
That’s scary. Emotional truth - it’s really hard. I have to say even now it takes courage to tell the emotional truth. And yet, if you have that in your life it kind of wakes up the colors and makes you really feel like you’re in your life. I think that’s a daily sense of meaning and is what I aspire to more than a one moment connection with God; I aspire to an ongoing sense of meaning. So that song ("After All") was sort of my tool kit, you know? It’s about me finding my tool kit and part of the tool kit involves trying to be honest, saying honest things. Also one of the things in this song that was another big wake-up call was that sometimes emotional truth is actually stuff that you would consider to be immoral - when you love people you’re not suppose to love, when you hate people you’re not suppose to hate, when you question people you’re not suppose to question. You sense that there’s a sinfulness to it. You feel like someone’s going to hit you with a lightning bolt for your audacity and yet [the audacity] actually liberates you. That also is a weird truth that I’ve encountered as an adult where I had to go outside of my little short manifesto of who I was and what I believed in. I think that that song kind of spells out where things got pretty radical for me. In all of my songs I try to touch on - even the song I wrote about college pot heads - if you’re trying to say it like you saw it, I think that really helps. Somehow I think that helps the big picture… and also the attempt to say it like you saw it, in your experience and with your mind’s eye, with your third eye. I think that’s valuable.
The first line of the new album is, “I know change is a bad thing.” That’s a good thing to turn on its ear because you infuse change with so much positive power because it has so much positive power. You forget. Sometimes I’m very cocky and I encourage people to change their lives if they need to. And then I have to go through something and I realize… it’s a cliff feeling. It is. That’s a cliff you have to bring yourself to. You realize that you’ve been advising people to do things then feel like you have to rearrange your whole DNA. The whole album starts with my sympathy about that.
RockOm: Speaking of change, do you think you or other song artists and performers are essentially out of a job or perhaps have lost some voice since there’s not a George Bush to pick on anymore?
Dar Williams: Oh hardly, hardly. We have something to thank George Bush for. We got a pure dose of neo-con philosophy at work. The neo-con philosophy is about who's holding the big bag of marbles when everything hits the fan. We got to see what that looks like. There was no care [during the Bush years] that I could see for our country. Yet in the face of that political philosophy (and in reaction to it), local farmers markets went over the billion dollar mark. Two of my neighbors got chickens, independent of each other. One of them gave some of her chickens to other people. Now, the whole neighborhood is filled with chickens. Both neighbors started raising bees and started a garden with other neighbors and having garden meetings, which are just getting together and drinking a lot of wine [laughs]. We had a day when we made sauce and then we had a beautiful dinner of pasta with the tomato sauce that we made. We all had bags of it that we froze and brought home and we’ve been having that all winter. Opening a bag of this tomatoes sauce is like opening up the summer again. People understand that power is in their hand. It might be that I moved to a town that was really into that stuff, that was open to that heightened world of neighbors and community. That’s what I wrote about in the song “Summer Day,” which is the last song on the album. Maybe I just lucked out, but I’m surrounded by people that instead of saying, “Well I’ve got a lot of kids, thank God for Wal-Mart,” they say, “We’ve got kids and a family to take care of - let’s make the garden bigger. Let’s talk more about things we can do together to share the burden of our daily life.”
I think that there’s a part of the last eight years that taught us to take power into our own lives and hands. I think it was extremely profound for me, because I’m not a good neighbor. But maybe it’s because I got married and have a kid and this put me squarely in the world of people around me. We knew it was up to us to make the world better. Watching Clinton come into power simultaneously with the rise of the SUV was, I think, a statement of “We can have it all.” But, we can’t. Philanthropy is great and I think he was a philanthropist and a public servant but I think that we all have to serve. Give that to George Bush. That’s where the work begins. Now that Obama’s in, we can figure out how to line everything up that we’ve been doing in a way that can really manifest as a national vision. I think the work that we’ve done to allow Obama to get in office will say big stuff.
RockOm: Who do you listen to for inspiration? Who inspires you with their music or songs?
Dar Williams: Sometimes I’ll just pick out one song. There’s a woman named Cat Goldman who wrote a song called “The Weight of the World.” I’ve played it for my friend Lucy Roach and I told her she has to perform it [laughs]. “It’s the weight of the world and you have to set it free.” I’ll just go to a song like you’ll go to an old friend. I think that my soul-music is [the band] The Byrds. It’s funny for someone who loves words as much as I love words. I love harmony and melody and The Byrds took these incredible anthems and songs from the 60’s and turned them into these harmonic anthems and these gorgeous pieces of music. With this loose, hippie-feel… it’s like, ‘we’re not trying to hit you over the head, we’re just experiencing this’ so it’s not didactic. The Byrds are my favorite band of all time [laughs]. They sing songs by Pete Seeger. We turned on Pete Seeger for my son and it’s very interesting. Pete’s a neighbor. He lives two miles down the street and everybody knows him. There’s something about turning on the music of a person who truly believes, truly believes in the power of people deeply united in song. My husband walked in to see me and my son listening to a Pete Seeger record and said, “Gosh I just feel different.” You just feel like a better person walking into a house where Pete Seeger is singing.
RockOm: Where do you go next as a songwriter? Where do you feel being pulled?
Dar Williams: [Pause] That’s a really good question. I’m trying to think what I’ve been writing lately. [pause] I don’t know. What I try to do is just stay open to sort of seeing things directly; I know that sounds really passive, but that’s it and that’s hard enough. It’s turning off the TV. It’s getting out into things that challenge me and sometimes hurt, like when one of your limbs falls asleep and it’s waking up. Sometimes that means tracking down uncomfortable, awkward things that I have to reconcile. Other times it’s walking through a museum that can cause an epiphany or sometimes it's silence. I try to be good about not being completely distracted. And then I have distractions to make sure that I’m not pushing myself so hard that I’m losing my whimsy. It’s a really good balance to try to reach in an ordinary day for a person. If I had any other job, I would hope that I would be trying to find that job’s excellence. For writing, it’s definitely what I need to do.
Dar at Amazon
Tags: Dar Williams, Emotion, Faith, folk, George Bush, God, Interview, Promised Land, religion, RockOm, RockOm.net, singer-songwriter, spirituality, Sustainability
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Photo by Traci Goudie
Edited by Dorothy Berry