Dar Williams' First British Interview

The full text of this interview appeared in Issue 19 of the Kerrville Kronikle. What follows, constitutes approximately half of that interview.

The interview with Dar Williams was conducted in her dressing room at Labatt's Apollo, Manchester on the afternoon of Sunday 21st October 1995. A few hours later, Dar made her British stage debut supporting Joan Baez. Thanks to Katie Tomashevski at Monopoly PR for making all the arrangements.

Snowden and Williams form part of your name. They're pretty strong indications of a Welsh background, so what's the story [ED. NOTE. Dar's full name is Dorothy Snowden Williams].

I didn't know until this year. My sister was going to Wales - actually she didn't get to go in the end - she said "You know what, I think we're Welsh." Snowden is our middle name, but it's actually spelt with an "e" not an "o." Two big things in the Welsh tradition are carving in stone and harmony singing. My father belongs to the National Gravestone Association - just loves it. My sister did her senior thesis in College on a gravestone carver. Of course, we're all harmony singers. The whole family. She said, "Come to think of it, papa" - my grandfather, looks like Frank Lloyd Wright, who was Welsh. We said, "Dad, are we Welsh ?" and he said "Very much so, but we're also Irish and Scottish."

So what about those other Cetic connections.

Well, let's see. My grandmother's maiden name was Kelly. So we're about one quarter Irish. Actually there's part of the family called Fairey, and I'm not too sure where they were from - originally France, but I think they may have been Scots.

So how did Dorothy become Dar.

Sisters [Laughs]. I was going to be Darcy - from "Pride and Prejudice" - I think my mum liked that name. My sisters just called me Dar.

You're the youngest of three.

Yes, three girls. Meredith is the middle sister, and Julie is the oldest.

Are your parents and sisters musical.

Yea. My father is a bass man opera singer. He used to pay $2 to be in the Wagner chorus at the Metropolitan Opera [in New York]. To be a spear carrier. You would pay them $2 and go and be in the chorus. He just loved it. He did musicals in College and High School. Now he sings in the basement. In the woodshop. I caught my mother singing along with "Kiss Me Kate" once, when she was painting the front hall. She's got a beautiful voice, loves music, but is very much on the sidelines. She is very supportive of music in the family. Julie brings a guitar into her class where she teaches, to sing folk songs about the labour movement, and Pete Seeger and the pacifist movement - the folk history of our country. Meredith is a banker, but she is also in an acappella singing group in New York City. We're all involved musically.

So were you literally surrounded by music from the day you were born.

It was always very important. It just seemed like a given thing. I guess it's different in different families. Because I was the youngest, I think my parents were sick of kids records, so I had The Beatles. The Beatles were big - I think their harmonies really affected me as I was growing up. They really had accessible melodies and that was great. Judy Collins. Joan Baez was a biggie in the house. And The Byrds. We loved The Byrds. Jim Croce and stuff. That was my childhood music.

I understand that your parents were both College graduates.

Of Yale and Vasser [Laughs]. So they're smart.

So you grew up in your own words "in the suburbs of New York."

Yes, in Chappaqua. It means "swamp" in Native American language, I think. It's located on the North side of the city, just Upstate. I think I was a nervous child, but what's interesting is, it would have been nice - sometimes I think that the country is organic, because you have trees and streams, cows and rocks. Things that you can learn from, outside of your town. Then in New York City - the city is like a big organism. You learn from the human terrain, while the surburbs are sort of like, a science experiment. Everybody goes to raise their kids in the suburbs. In the morning everybody takes off on the train, to go to the city to work, and then they come home - I don't know, it's not the way I would raise my kids. I think there's something really poignant about that - my parents went there so that they could raise kids - so that we could be safe and happy and have very controlled lives and not have too much risk or danger. Now I'm saying, I wish I could raise my kids in a place where it was a little more challenging. It would still be a rural environment, as opposed to a city one.

I lived in a small town for the first nineteen years of my life. Then I moved to cities to study and find work. I'm glad that I experienced that initial period where the countryside was just at the end of the road.

I think it's very important. We had countryside, but it was because it was a pretty wealthy suburb - it was this commodity called, countryside. It was something that this person had bought, and that person had bought. If you had a very strong natural experience, it was sort of a side effect I would have thought. It would be nice to have something that was not bought for you, and was just there [Laughs].

Was there a particular teacher at High School who encouraged your interest in theatre.

Certainly. We had a great theatre teacher and we're still friends. He lives in Florida.

So he's retired.

Yeah [Laughs]. He was always very tough, but very wise. I had a teacher like that in College too. He was very patriarchal in a lot of ways. At the same time, very knowing, because he knew not to push me too hard. That the best thing was to give me a challenge and then to step back. I could then rise to it or not. Vanessa Williams went to my High School. She was the first, black Miss America and now she's a pop star. He said "She never made a mistake." She took every direction and never made a mistake. She was sort of the golden standard that we all aspired to [Laughs]. Again, I was nervous - I was just an anxious child. I really wanted to do it right. I don't think I was meant to be doing things right. I was meant to be following my own drummer. He knew how to set the challenges so that I could really try - I think I grew a lot. His name was Phil Stewart. Very Scottish actually, and proud of his heritage. The High School which I attended was called Horse Greeley, and it was a public school.

What was the practical end result of these drama classes in High School. Were there plays and reviews. Any directing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did very little directing in School. In College, I did a lot more directing. I just acted in musicals. I was in "Pippin" and in "Godspell." I was also in student written reviews, for which I composed the music, so that was the beginning of that. I did Summer Theatre and that changed my life. I was kind of a slacker before Summer Theatre. I wanted to be a gym teacher. I wanted to do something that I wouldn't have to be so accountable for. Then I was in this Summer Theatre. I loved the people so much, and they were so mature and sophisticated. They were in College and talked about such interesting things. I wanted so much, to know all the things that they knew. By the third year of High School, I got the learning bug and got very serious.

Was this Summer Theatre part of a Summer Camp.

No. This was in my hometown. That's the thing that I love about towns with any kind of infrastructure. We had Summer Theatre and it changed my life. People actually went to see these horrible plays [Laughs]. We only did professionally written musicals and plays during the summer and there were student written reviews during the School year.

Following High School you attended the Wesleyan University. Where is it located.

In Connecticutt, which is the Southern part of New England. It's in Middletown. We called it an armpit [Laughs], but we loved it. It was very good. It was unpretentious and I think that was important. It was a real town.

Because it was a small town, was the environment literally the same as being at home.

It was different. It had more of a class structure. It was actually famous as a town that had three mental hospitals, as well as having a College. Of course, everyone in town called the College, the fourth mental hospital [Laughs]. There was some grittyness to it, and it seemed like the skies were a little greyer. It really was a good - I think the grit was good for me. So it was different.

The degree which you took was a joint one. Theatre and.....

Religion. I was going to be an English major, but I was so sick about talking about other people's work. I mean, I thought it's all well and good to know how other people did this, but if you're only learning technique and not finding the inspiration to it - it's good to do both I think. After a while, it seemed like there was no soul in it. It was almost like I was trying to take the soul out of something. I knew if I was an English major it would just - I was more interested in studying religion, because it seemed like you could answer a lot of questions, but then you could leave some unanswered.

There was also an anthropological aspect to studying religion.

Yeah. I came to think the way everybody thinks about their major in College. The religious questions, are the most important questions that people ask. The questions that people ask about their own destiny, are the ones that lead us to be warring societies - in civil wars - or peaceful societies. I came to think of that as the source of all questioning, but of course everybody thinks that about their major.

Did you continue to write music while you were at College.

A little bit. I went to Berkeley, California for a summer, which is of course where a lot of folk singers were. I did something, that I realised was an interesting choice. It has a real tradition of coffee houses and stuff like that. I wanted to sing in a bar, and I went to an Irish bar. I thought that you had to sing Irish music, and I didn't know any Irish music, so I wrote some traditional Irish songs [Laughs]. Kind of fudged it, but of course you didn't have to. I went to an open mike. I thought that you had to sing Irish music for the open mike [Laughs]. So I went and I sang - I wrote some songs that summer. The interesting choice I made was, I was working for this terrible environmental canvassing organisation. Joan Baez was coming to town to sign her autobiography. I ended up deciding not to quit my job, to go to the signing. I think if I'd gone to the signing and bought the book, and read it that summer - I decided not to read the book, because I didn't want to posture myself. I just wanted have my own life - and I knew that I'd just want to have her life. I ended up getting my heart broken that summer, in that job, and kind of being horribly depressed for two years after that in College.

Was that "the doldrums" which you refer to in your album liner.

No, that was something else. This was my first set. This was a worse set of doldrums, because it really was a life or death choice. This was after my second year of College, so I'd have been around nineteen or twenty. It was probably 1987. It's funny, because I think if I'd chosen to read Joan's book and to meet Joan, I would probably have left College. I might have just decided to become a minstrel. Instead, I stuck it out and had a very different life. The choice that I made, was to get out of my depression - the ways that I got out of my depression, and got back on my feet, was that I got into therapy and stuff. That's very important to my art now. I'm glad that I did that [Laughs].

Which year did you graduate from Wesleyan.

In 1989.

Then you moved to Boston, Massachusetts.

Exactly.

Why Boston.

It's funny, I was going to move to where I am now, and - there were so many women there, that I thought "Oh gosh, it's hard enough to find a date in College and that was co-ed." I was up in Boston with a friend and we were drinking cappuccino and eating bagels and she said "We got a cappuccino and bagel for two dollars. The standard of living is so accessible, why don't you move here ?" She was moving there. She said "It's such a livable place, why don't you just live here ?" I wanted to be playwright and what's interesting, is that there's no playwriting there. Everything comes out of New York. If I really wanted to be a playwright, the only place to go was New York. There was no grass roots support for theatre, but there was grass roots support for music. I worked for a opera company when I first moved there, because I was interested in directing opera. While I was at the opera I decided that I wanted to sing, so it was a perfect time to decide to try music as well as playwriting. The playwriting went nowhere and the music took off.

What type of play were you attempting to write.

I love all theatre. I love all different kinds of theatre. I wasn't writing musicals, for sure. They were just straightforward dramatic plays. I really love experimental theatre, but it really wasn't my bag then, and you really need to do that type of theatre with a group I think.

Why did you decide to take voice lessons.

I had been smoking for about six months and I thought that it had knocked out my upper register. I was really nervous that I had lost something that I couldn't recover, so I went back to see if I could. The name of my voice teacher was Jeanie Deva - she had changed her name [Laughs]. She was very encouraging.

Is one of the verses in "You're Aging Well" about her.

No. "The woman of voices," is actually - in the second verse - she is the woman who discovers all of the voices in her head, as instruments. She's the one who comes around the corner with music around her. It's just someone who is sort of dancing with her own life, and has that kind of harmony with her inner voices, enough to come to someone who is 15 and say "I have peace now. You are just where you are supposed to be, and someday you'll be where I am, and you'll be even happier." That's really - it's not about her. There are a lot of women, I think that - "Fear of Aging" was an advertising campaign that worked very well in the fifties and sixties, but a lot of those women came of age and said to the women of the seventies and eighties, "You don't have to be so afraid of aging, because there's actually a lot of gifts." There's a lot of effort on the part of these women to turn around and say to younger women "We'll help you. We're here for you. You don't have anything to fear." That's really what it's about.

So have I grasped it correctly. Was the "Woman of Voices" a concept.

It's a concept [Laughs]. I remember when Joan's "Play Me Backwards" album came out, it seemed to have a lot of wisdom in it. Joan Baez wasn't trying to be Joan Collins. She looked more beautiful than ever, and I thought "Gosh, I think that song maybe is about someone like her." And also, there were these great modern dance teachers at Wesleyan, who were just radiant. Very wise women. Who were nuts. Lovely people who were just funny and crazy, and had more energy than the College students [Laughs]. They were a real inspiration.

Come to think of it, when did you learn to play guitar.

I started when I was nine. I put it down when I was thirteen or fourteen and picked it up again about seventeen or eighteen.

Then you started working the open mikes in Boston.

Those were at a range of venues, and actually, I think that was great. When I was first starting out, I remember someone said, "I broke up with my girlfriend last year. I went to an open mike every day of the week for a year." [Laughs]. He said "If you want to get better, go to an open mike as much as possible." I was thinking I would go maybe, once a week. I started going three or four times a week. It was a very different atmosphere per place. There was one hippy throwback place that was just a big corridor, and we just hung out there - it was during the Persian Gulf thing - and there was just this very poetic, strong voice of dissent. I just loved it there. Then there was one that was more formal, where famous people would come through town and try out a new song. Then there was a bar that was kind of seedy, but fun. Someone even had a hoot night at his house, which was great. Little by little you get tip jar gigs, or openers for other people. Very slowly you build up a following.

Did you still have a day job during this period.

Yes. It was mostly part time. It was a patchwork of jobs. I wasn't full time with music until 1994.

Then you got your first bar gig in Bristol, Connecticutt. Was that Sal's.

It was like Sal's. But no, it was not Sal's. You know, John Prine played at Sal's the night before it burned down [Laughs]. This bar in Bristol was called, The Common Ground. It was run by - I don't think he was Irish, I think he was English - an Englishman named Graham - I was thinking of quitting the first night I played there. I'd broken up with someone the week before, and just thought I couldn't go on with this. It was so hard and so merciless, this world. There were about five people there, and I thought "Well, there's five people who won't be listening." Immediately, two people came over and sat in front of me - just planted a beer and listened to me all night and had questions about my songs. When I sang "When Sal's Burned Down" I said "This is about a bar in my College town and there's a reference to the Mafia in it, even though the Mafia's gone." Everybody turned around in their seats and said "You think it is. No, it's not." That's what they said. Or they said "You want to bet" [Laughs]. They all said that. Afterwards they all bought me beers and gave me cigarettes. Graham got down on his knees and proposed to me. They asked me back. I mean, it was just so jolly that I decided to continue [Laughs]. I was still doing some covers. It was a long night, I remember - two or three hours.

When did you start concentrating on your songwriting.

During 1991 - 1992 was really when I began concentrating on it.

So where does the name of your song publishing company, Burning Field Music come from.

A friend of mine and I were touring in 1992, and we saw all these fields on fire in California. It turned out to be something that was very important to help the seeds grow - by burning the fields. I love fields so much and this idea that, you know - I really see a field as sort of a metaphor for my life, because I'm so scattered. I just need a big terrain in which to play in. That's how I get the best results. The idea that every once in a while you've just got to put the whole thing up in flames and then set about growing crops again.

Did you feel a sense of loss regarding these burning fields, or was it the fact that regrowth followed.

Actually, it was both. A strong sense of loss. What I've discovered since then, is apparently a lot of organic farmers don't burn their fields. They think it's very irresponsible. So I don't know, it's sort of an inappropriate name [Laughs].

Once you'd recorded "The Honesty Room" and released it yourself, how did you fall in with Andrew Calhoun.

He showed up one night when I was playing at the Folk Alliance in Boston. He - it was very funny - I played the song "February" and it was a very famous night - it was the first time my current manager heard me. The first night my booking agent heard me. The first time a lot of people heard me. There were only fifty people in the room, Andrew included. He came up to me and kissed me on my head afterwards. He told me later, it was because he'd seen my former manager kiss me on the head. He said "Well, if he's gonna do that, I'm gonna do that" [Laughs]. He said "I want you to be on my label. You're more than welcome any time you want." That was it.

Want to read more ? Why don't you check out how to purchase Issue 19 of this fanzine in the Back Issues section of the Kerrville Kronikle Homepage.

Dar Williams - The "Mortal City" interview

The interview with Dar Williams took place on the afternoon of Tuesday 5th March 1996. Dar was in her hotel room at the Swiss Cottage Hotel in North London, while I was at Kronikle Mission Kontrol in Birmingham. Thanks to Holly Morris at Mark Borkowski's for making all the arrangements and for the tape, CD's and photographs.

The "Mortal City" interview appeared in Issue 20 of the Kerrville Kronikle. Check out the Back Issues section of the Kerrville Kronikle Homepage for details of how to obtain your copy.