FolkWax Sittin' In With Dar Williams

By Kerry Dexter May 14, 2003 FolkWax e-zine

Dar Williams studied theater and religion when she was in college, thinking she'd be a playwright. "But there was no support for grassroots theater, street theater," she said. Music was another story. "Even though there was no money, you could get up on a stage with a song, and sing it that night. So in a way it was a different path, but a path, one where I could keep putting one foot in front of the other." She's kept doing that, through five very different albums that nevertheless form a cohesive body of work that shows the development of an artist with a unique perspective. Her latest disc, The Beauty of the Rain, resonates with songs that suggest movement, change and journeying. "There's a lot of movement because there was a lot of movement in my life," Williams explained. "I moved twice in the course of writing songs for that album." She also got married. "These songs probably reflected more what was going on in my life," the ever-thoughtful songwriter suggested. "I found myself writing more from specific interactions I was having as opposed to concepts I was thinking about. That to me is like journeying. You almost hear the footsteps, the feet walking, you know!" Williams started out on that path growing up in New York listening to her parents' record collection, which consisted of "Folk Rock, sixties Folk Rock, and then the Beatles, and Classical music, from which I learned a lot about melody, harmony and counterpoint. I also listened to a lot of just good old New York bad Pop music. Then in college I was exposed to some great songwriter stuff, and also to performance art and experimental music."   Williams soon added her voice and unique song perspective to the New England singer/ songwriter scene. "I got a lot of criticism, I got a lot of critiques, you know. There was stuff that was useless information, stuff that was jealous information, and stuff that was really ground breaking information that helped push me forward," Williams recalled. That forward movement resulted a self-produced debut disc, The Honesty Room, which contained the hits "You're Aging Well" and "When I Was a Boy," marking Williams as a storyteller of modern life with an edgy sensibility as well as a sense of humor. Three more albums, Mortal City, End of Summer and The Green World, indicated Williams' growing skill as a thoughtful storyteller and a vocalist with a unique voice. A fearless road warrior, Williams toured extensively on her own and shared stages with Bruce Coburn, Richard Thompson and Joan Baez, and appeared at the Newport Folk Festival and Lilith Fair. In 1997, she also collaborated with friends Richard Shindell and Lucy Kaplansky for the acclaimed collection Cry Cry Cry, which saw the trio giving original sound and harmony to a group of contemporary songs by writers including James Keelaghan, Robert Earl Keen and Leslie Smith. The heart of Williams' art is, of course, her songwriting. How does she begin? "It doesn't take much to create something that I really can build around," she said. "If I find a beautiful chord on the guitar, that can be one way of getting in." But she often finds inspiration when she's away from her instrument, too. "Another thing that happens with me, and I think it happens with a lot of people, is that I hear a street sound, or there's a lyrical lilt to a sentence that somebody is saying, and it'll become a melody in my ear and that will find words attached to it. That can happen on the subway or when I'm in my car."  Landscape often forms a jumping off point for Williams writing, landscape which may range from a traffic jam in Toronto to a mountainside in the Asian country of Bhutan to that New York subway. "As I go around the world I don't see a huge difference between interior and exterior landscapes," she said "Maybe that's the religion major. There's just sort of a lack of discernment between magic and reality and inner and outer landscapes. At its best and most realistic it's invisible." Williams' own exterior landscape has changed with her recent move to New York City. "I was two and a half years in Cambridge, and eight years in Northampton, and I think I'd had enough of enlightened college towns," she said, laughing. "I think I was ready for an enlightened metropolis!" Her approach to putting together The Beauty of the Rain was a change also. There are a number of guests, including Mike Kang of String Cheese Incident, Bela Fleck and Alison Krauss. "I'm actually much closer personally to everybody on this album than I was on the first one so I was able to listen to them more, and to trust them, to say, well, you're my friends, let's see what you come up with. I think I've learned how to be more hands off," Williams said, " and there are even places I wish I'd gone back a bit farther and let them whack out more!" Venturing in another direction, Williams has been working on a children's book. She continues to be involved with environmental causes through The Snowden Foundation, and she was recently featured in a Vanity Fair photo shoot  (along with Dan Zanes, David Johansen, and Beth Orton) as one of the "New Folkies." People have always questioned how Williams fits into the realm of Folk music; she herself is more concerned with creating the music than defining it. "I don't really care if it's Folk music or not," Williams said, "because first of all nobody knows what Folk music is any more, so if I did something to be Folk, there's a good chance nobody would realize why I was doing that particular thing. Also, if you force something to be one genre or another, it's just a disaster. Things are meant to be what they're meant to be." Kerry Dexter is a senior contributing editor at FolkWax. She maybe contacted at folkwax@visnat.com. You can subscribe to FolkWax and other e-zines here.