Dar Williams exhibits all of her considerable talents on her dark and gorgeous new album
by j poet
From a local music store mag, Manifesto, from Rasputin Music in Berkeley, Ca.
(Feb 2003)

Dar Williams may be the best female singer/songwriter in America today.  
Sure, there are several other women in the pop/folk field with higher profiles, but none of them create the kind of profoundly heartfelt work that is a Williams trademark.  Williams has been growing as a vocalist and songwriter since 1995 when Razor & Tie picked up Honesty Room, her third self-produced album, for national distribution.  On The Beauty of the Rain her work is even more profound than it was on Green World, her last studio album.  Williams has always been a powerful and compassionate lyricist; this time she's written a batch of gorgeous melodies to complement the words, and many of them, including "One Who Knows," "Farewell to the Old Me" and the title track, are evocative enough to bring tears to the eye, even if you don't catch the lyrics.

"The melody is what points to the next idea, the next phrase," Williams says from her New York apartment.  "My job is to grow as a human and as an artist, and the melodies point a finger at the next worthy subject.  I was writing a song about my husband, for example, wondering, 'should it be a song about his eyes and ears or in praise of his spiritual values?'  Guided by the melody it became a song about our ability to find and sustain love in a world where everything is against an ongoing, loving situation, all guided by the melancholy melody that came into my head."

It was her dedication to her art and personal growth that led Williams to move to New York City.  She got settled in her apartment shortly before the events of September 11, 2001, but even though she often uses her life as subject matter, she said 9/11 had little effect on her songwriting.  Even tunes like "Mercy of the Fallen" and "The World's Not Falling Apart" with their obvious parallels to the terrorist attacks were in the works before September.

"I tend to deal with things implicitly, not explicitly," Williams explains.  "Songs on the album that I wrote after 9/11 - 'Fishing in the Morning,' 'One Who Knows' and 'Mercy of the Fallen' - may deal with loss, but in a very small, focused way.  Heartache is a universal experience, no matter what causes it."

Williams has obviously had her share of heartache, but she illuminates it with her art, and fights it in the real world with Snowden Environmental Trust, a foundation she created and supports.  "The foundation is there to help people procure small plots of land that are crucial to a community.  A small pond, a parcel of wetlands that's too small for the government to protect, an old farm that local environmentalists want to return to natural space.  We support it with a mailing list where people sell 'bootleg' tapes of my concerts and the proceeds of the Cry, Cry, Cry record [a one-off trio album Williams made with Lucy Kaplansky and Richard Shindell.]  And a big chunk of money came from my sale of my Enron stock.  I bought it originally 'cause I'd heard they were interested in exploring green energy, but when they supported Bush, I got rid of it.  I'm probably one of the lucky few who made money from their schemes."