By Scott Alarik, Globe Correspondent, 8/20/2000
Dar Williams is growing up. That thought will cross most listeners' minds at some point during the New England songwriter's long-awaited new CD, ''The Green World,'' her first solo work since 1997's breakthrough ''End of the Summer.'' In between, she formed the hugely successful songwriter ensemble Cry Cry Cry with Richard Shindell and Lucy Kaplansky; moved from Northampton to a house she bought in New York's Hudson Valley; and changed management from Young/Hunter, who handle Shindell and Chris Smither, to AGF, the New York firm that launched the careers of Suzanne Vega and Shawn Colvin.
''The Green World'' (Razor & Tie), due in stores Tuesday, is a typically sharp-minded, tenderhearted masterpiece from Williams, 33, who may be the finest folk songwriter of her generation. As her fans know, she has been growing up on her previous three discs: part of her appeal is the uncompromising honesty with which she lets us glimpse, through her, all the painful, joyful, graceful, and bumbling inner journeys of growing up a woman in modern America. But ''The Green World,'' more than ever before, finds her coming to terms with coming of age.
There is a recurring theme of accepting the world as it is, not as we would like it to be; but that acceptance is presented as a call to arms, never a surrender. With the ebullient strut of the opening cut, ''Playing to the Firmament,'' she warns against the dangers of growing up too much to savor the wild innocence of the green world around us: ''What's the rush? Dip your brush into this twilight/There are leaves upon the skylight/Trace your hand, trace your hand.''
Even in the toughest, most searingly intimate ballads, moments of anguish and deep depression find quiet resolution through a simple acceptance of our imperfect selves and of the imperfect world swirling around us.
''I think in my 20s I thought that religion and spiritual practice meant doing things right,'' she says. ''Now I think it's about realizing you can't do everything right, and figuring out how you're going to live with the fact that you're going to fall short. That's where you find grace and unconditional love; not because you did all these perfect actions to deserve it, but because you are. That kind of understanding of being a flawed person looking at religion, not a person running to catch up with her better self, reawakened a lot of the spiritual texts I had read while studying religion in college.''
Of two minds?
Williams majored in religion and theater at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., and the two wrestled for her attention until she discovered the subterranean folk scene while living in Boston in the mid-1980s. Through it, she found a way to honor both muses as a dramatically potent, spiritually incisive songwriter.
The CD title is a theater term describing one of the two worlds in William Shakespeare's plays. There is the court world, where most of his historical dramas and tragedies are set. Then there is the green world, the wild, fey forests of ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' and ''As You Like It.'' She takes that magic place - which seems anarchic to outsiders, but has its own rules and hierarchies - and uses it as imagery for what she calls ''the chaotic spaces of our own lives, where we learn things we had no desire to learn but that are incredibly valuable.''
''`End of the Summer' was titled,'' she explains, ''because its central theme was about people coming into authority and deciding what to do about it, facing power and the abuse of power and figuring out what to do about the plagues of an ordered world. `The Green World' is about people who go inside and find their own authority, then come back and have to deal with that in the ordered, closed world around them.''
Musically, ''The Green World'' falls nicely between the stark folkiness of ''Mortal City'' and the thicker folk-rock of ''End of the Summer.'' Producer Stewart Lerman built arrangements around each song's mood, bringing in resonant instruments like a Dylanesque Hammond organ to create lush but never busy soundscapes for Williams's sparely eloquent guitar and sure, pretty vocals. Her voice has never sounded so rich, at once conversationally close and operatically soaring.
This is also her most impressionistic album, sticking less to narrative paths than capturing moments of quiet revelation. In the brilliant meditation ''After All,'' she harrowingly describes chronic depression: ''It felt like a winter machine that you go through and then/You catch your breath and winter starts again/And everyone else is spring bound.'' By song's end her head is poking through the gray: ''The sun rose with so many colors it nearly broke my heart/It worked me over like a work of art/And I was a part of all that.''
Subtle impressions
Perhaps because this is her most impressionistic recording, it can sometimes be a bit too obscure. In the musically gorgeous ''We Learned the Sea,'' the listener is given too little to know what reality is moving behind the imagery, why we are supposed to feel the way the sad, sweeping melody suggests. And in the wonderfully titled ''I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono,'' Williams seems to break one of her own cardinal rules, basking in the cleverness of the concept at the expense of being clear about just what she is trying to say.
But even these songs contain wonderful moods and moments. All the songs have little songs tucked within them, sparkling nuggets of wit and insight that shine all on their own. In ''Spring Street,'' for example, she contemplates a a fresh start in New York City before realizing that new beginnings must begin within us. Within her musing, she fires this fierce broadside at Manhattan pretensions: ''I can find a small apartment where a struggling artist died/And pretend because I pay the rent I know the pain inside.'' The next verse begins with a beautifully sculpted freestanding couplet: ''This year April had a blizzard, just to show she did not care/And the new dead leaves made the trees look like children with gray hair.''
In her hands, kindness becomes as powerful a tool of radical insight as rage is in the hands of political songwriters such as Ani DiFranco. For her kindness, like DiFranco's fury, has the courage to break the rules. Amid the youthful desolation of ''After All,'' she dares to thank her parents for battling their inner demons enough to not pass them on to her, thus giving her a fighting chance to master her own. In the stunningly effective ''Happens Every Day,'' she empathizes with the mundane torments of youth, watching college students at a coffeehouse: ''You would think they're carefree, I have seen their trials/Frowning into Shakespeare and practicing their smiles.''
In the anthemic ''Another Mystery,'' she surgically debunks ''the cult of beautiful pain,'' the black-lipsticked poseurs who mask their fear of life with a studied diffidence she calls ''an inscrutable pout.'' ''I don't want to be another mystery'' she shouts, concluding, ''I wanna be the one to feel the sun/So if you want to see the world with me, let's go.''
It is this healing courage, most of all, that makes Williams such an important songwriting voice. She never wraps herself in the alluring veil of her angst, wearing her scars like fashion statements. She shows us growing up as the painful thing it truly is, offering her insight and experience as signposts to the green world waiting for us just outside our darker selves.
''In all these songs,'' she says, ''there is an acceptance of the beauty and grace of the things that you're not going to figure out or that are not going to come to you through the conventional channels. We're so good at thinking we know all the answers, but if you go into a wild space, if you just stare at a tree for long enough, you learn things that a very economy-driven, faux-moralistic society like ours cannot teach you. Accepting that these truths are going to be subtle is probably the biggest theme of the record, because the green world doesn't have rubber-stamp answers, which is probably the best thing the green world has going for it. And maybe that's the best thing being alive has going for it.''
This story ran on page M3 of the Boston Globe on 8/20/2000.
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