On her own terms, she leads folk's pack

By Scott Alarik The Boston Globe Friday, April 11, 2003

It is a bit premature to call 35-year-old Dar Williams an elder of the folk world. But it is Williams, more than any other songwriter except Ani DiFranco, that young folkies today see as their guiding light. ''The new generation of songwriters, particularly female ones,'' says Club Passim manager Matt Smith, ''are not looking at Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez for inspiration anymore. You don't even have everybody trying to sound like Shawn Colvin, like you once did. Those reins have been taken over by Dar Williams and Ani DiFranco. They're the two leading songwriters of this new generation.'' This may strike some as odd, because Williams has never had a major hit, never even been on a major label. But it is precisely the populist zeal with which she navigated her rise from Boston open miker to Orpheum headliner, as she is Saturday, that attracts budding songwriters to her flame. Like DiFranco's rise, Williams's self-won success is something of a slap in the face of the mainstream music industry. Even without major-label marketing muscle, her serenely pretty and strikingly wise new CD, ''The Beauty of the Rain,'' her sixth solo effort, is winning accolades from all corners. People magazine named it album of the week in March. Rolling Stone called it ''impressive.'' The fact is, she recently let a few major-label executives woo her, but she and manager Ron Fierstein, who guided Colvin and Suzanne Vega to major-label stardom, chose to stay with the indie Razor and Tie, where Williams has been since 1996. She resists any notion that giving the majors the thumbs-down was another display of heroic independence. ''Honestly, I was just afraid of somebody making a fool of me,'' she says, ''making me go broke, insulting me about who I am, or breaking my stride by saying, `Why did we sign you anyway?' I was afraid of losing the momentum I already have. With the audience I have right now, it's not so much about them putting me up and I'm alone there. It's more like we're all in this together, which gives me a real sense of room to explore. I just think that's a real good medium for me.'' Fierstein says he wasn't surprised Williams decided not to go to a major. But he was surprised at how easy the decision was. ''The major labels have very little patience to work a record over a long period of time,'' he says. ''They're interested in projects that can explode into seven figures, and as soon as they sense a project is not going to `blow up,' as they put it, they lose interest. It was clear that was the kind of pressure Dar would face: Come up with that hit single we can take to VH1, or else you're in danger of us ignoring your record after two weeks.'' Williams's legend is an oft-told tale in the folk world. In 1994, as a self-released artist touring veggie cafes and tiny coffeehouses, she was among the very first musicians to harness the Internet as a fan-building tool. In those days, you could follow her tour by the bursts of chatter on brand-new folk lists and chat rooms. ''Dar certainly spearheaded that movement of folk singers building careers just by word-of-e-mail, discussion boards, and things like that,'' Smith says. ''Most people don't go into folk today thinking, `I'm going to get discovered and get signed.' It's more `I'm going to make a CD by myself, sell it myself.' Along with Ani, Dar was the first to show that you can really succeed on that independent level.'' Williams is characteristically self-mocking about her role as Internet pioneer. ''First of all, I did not discover the Internet, it discovered me,'' she says. ''Luck was a big part of this. The Internet was stretching its wings as a populist movement to cut out the middleman in terms of what music people were listening to, and I became the guinea pig. People said, `Let's see if this person who's just starting out, who doesn't have radio play yet, can go on a three-month tour in her little Honda and make a living because all of us are showing up for her gigs.' It was like a chain letter; you know, `How far can we make this go?' '' Of course, Williams was not chosen by random. Her confessional ballads rippled with populist calls-to-arms, radical wit, and wrenching pleas for community. She was wonderfully outspoken about the possibilities new technologies offered for making art free of corporate trappings: real people sharing real songs about their real lives. ''I think I've been very sanctimonious over the years,'' she says, ''because there are lots of very good reasons to go independent, good reasons politically and morally: small business, local business, working with people you trust, doing your work on your own terms, not letting someone dictate how you should sound or how much you should weigh. And I'll stand by that. But, you know, I've also been a Buddhist, a Christian, a bad girl, a good girl, a neurotic girl, a suicidal girl, a flashy bleached-blond person, and a total granola-kid. And it was all good. ''So my message is, if you feel like you have something important to say, then go for it, because you probably do. But if at the end of the day, you find you've lost a bit of your soul peddling this, it might not be what you're supposed to be doing.'' Dar Williams plays the Orpheum Theatre Saturday at 8 p.m. Tickets $25 and $30. Call 617-661-1252 or 617-931-2000. This story ran on page C12 of the Boston Globe on 4/11/2003.