The Ottawa Citizen
January 17, 1998

By Lynn Saxberg

Mortal City is not one of Dar Williams' newest or most popular songs, but if you lived in Eastern Ontario or Western Quebec and first heard it last week, it would have sent a shiver up your spine.

The song tells of a romance that blossoms in a darkened apartment during an ice storm and how residents of a cold city come together, turning off their power one by one to help the hospital. To those of us who spent time in the dark last week, it was eerily appropriate. But as the title track to Williams' 1996 disc, Mortal City is old news to a growing number of Williams' fans. Many are discovering her on the strength of her excellent new album, End of the Summer, which came out last summer.

Boosted by appearances with Sarah McLachlan's Lilith Fair tour and substantial buzz on the Internet, Williams is now one of the fastest-rising singer/songwriters on U.S. Americana radio stations, a format that has no equivalent in Canada. Here you're most likely to hear her songs on CBC or campus radio.

She is that rare creature: a folksinger breaking through to the American mainstream. Compared to every female singer from Ani Difranco to Shawn Colvin, Williams' witty, eloquent lyrics, warm voice and irresistible melodies endear her to fans both young and somewhat older. She makes her Ottawa debut on Sunday in a sold-out concert at the Great Canadian Theatre Company, a fund-raiser for the CKCU Ottawa Folk Festival.

Born Dorothy nearly 31 years ago, Williams grew up in the suburbs of New York City and majored in theatre, but has lived in the semi-rural environs of western Massachusetts for the last five years.

"If you're in a city, you have that landscape, but if you're out where I am, you're going to find yourself using mountains and seasons and fields as metaphors. It's just going to work its way in, no matter what,'' she says.

The song Mortal City is also characteristic of Williams' knack for getting to the heart of a situation, whether it's an act of nature or a family crisis or any of the myriad of complexities involved in growing up.

"I think that those observations can have a lot of sides to them,'' says Williams. "Looking at the humanity of the situation can have a lot of perspectives and a lot of sides and that can be an interesting song -- how people come together a lot more than we give them credit for in a very mortal context or how various states of emergency come through us in our daily lives and how we united around it, fixing problems.

"In fact it was hard to write the song Mortal City because I was going through a pretty anti-urban time and so for me, it was a reconciliation of loving what I experienced in cities.''

Most songs on End of the Summer are not as direct as those on Mortal City. With the material on the earlier disc, Williams tends to take a stand; things aren't so clear-cut on End of the Summer. Check out the thirtysomething slacker looking for a bash in Party Generation, the social commentary in Teenagers, Kick Our Butts or her insight into psychotherapy in What Do You Hear in These Sounds. None of these issues is slammed, but neither are they fully embraced.

It's all part of of reaching adulthood, she says. Things that once seemed black and white develop shades of grey. "In general, the complexity and the compassion goes beyond politics -- you know, understanding how things did get messed up, and how it wasn't just evil, it was forgetfulness. The subtext is really rich and interesting and really much more engaging as an artistic subject.

"Part of me just wishes I could write a song called Stop Hydro Quebec. I want to write another song called Start Using Solar Power and another song called Save The Forest In California, but it doesn't make for a good song.''

Other aspects of maturing do make good songs, as Williams discovered while making End of Summer. Looking at the finished product, she realized it has a strong coming-of-age theme, wrapped up in some of her fullest arrangements and most pop-oriented melodies. "On this one a lot of the pop stuff came up, which makes sense because a lot of this album deals with coming-of-age stuff that happens somewhere between the age of 15 and 22 -- the first time you're on the road and you think it's going to change you and turn you into Jack Kerouac, and the first time you butt your head up against authority and you realize the authority is really fallible -- and it's not just a matter of a power struggle, it's sort of a breakthrough of compassion. Those things are rites of passage that are never quite repeated the same way.

"That happens usually in late adolescence and that's when I was listening to the most pop music.''

These days, her radical environmentalist streak and love of nature, combined with a rural home base, has filled her songs with references to weather -- cloudy skies, summer rains and ice storms -- and the changing seasons. It's a characteristic not uncommon to Canadian singer/songwriters.

Though she feels an affinity with Canada, and has enjoyed her few performances here (at the Calgary and Edmonton Folk Festivals), Williams is not likely to give up on western Mass.

"There's something in me that feels really at home in Canada,'' she says. "There's a lot more landscape to commune with -- that counts for a lot with me. But basically the only thing that would move me from the Northeast would be being swept off my feet ... so there'd have to be some very charismatic Canadian to get me to move farther north.''

Dar, you should have been here last week. If ice storms are conducive to romance, you would have been swept away by the candlelit community vibe.