Performing Songwriter Magazine September/October 1994
 

by Scott Alarik

Dar Williams squirms a little in her seat as the interview ends. "I hope you can get some sense out of all that," she says mournfully eyeing the tape recorder. "It felt like I was kind of here-and-there; a little scattered."  Then, shrugging and smiling, she said, "Oh well, like my friend Paul Iorio says, every songwriter talks the way they write songs."

While this revelation may go a long way toward explaining why Julia Roberts sounds a little confused about her relationship with Lyle Lovett - not to mention why Bob Dylan can be difficult to talk to, or Joni Mitchell a bit of a loner - it also brings what had been a delightful, surprising and adventurous interview into keen focus.

At 27, New England songwriter Dar Williams is very hot.  With the much acclaimed release of her exceptional premiere CD, The Honesty Room, a new management and booking deal with Fleming/Tamulevich - two of the most respected acoustic agencies in the biz - Williams' star is rising very fast. And she's right, she does talk the way she writes her songs. Her speech is often sprinkled with fresh surprising images, vividly articulate reflections and deep rumination.  She is very funny, laughs easily and often, unafraid to chuckle in appreciation of her own well-turned phrases. But always present is her deep belief in folk music, in poetry and in the plain power of telling the truth.

Dar Williams is a songwriter likely to be described, rather unfairly, as "quirky." She looks for fresh, fun and unlikely ways to tell her stories, but the stories themselves are always deeply human, accessible and heartfelt. Cleverness to her is a tool, not an end in itself.  "I’m trying to get away from clever," she said.  "There's some stuff from my older recording that I don't want to re-record, because they're more clever than anything else.   But it's a little scary to depart from clever.  Clever to me is what's there for its own sake, for the impact of a one-liner.  The things I write about mean a lot to me; I really enjoy thinking about them, crafting them, and I do enjoy surprising people, and that's where clever came in. But I would be really upset if that obfuscated the soul of the piece."

The two opening cuts of The Honesty Room are perfect examples of that.
 "When I was a boy," probably her best-known song, uses the obviously clever hook and some delicious reminiscences of an unfettered and proudly eccentric childhood to plaintively remind us that, once, we were all unfettered.  Then, as society intrudes on our innocence, we learn how to be less than our whole selves, to strap ourselves into inhibiting clothing and even more inhibiting mores.

"Alleluia" is, at first, a fine sarcasm about a dead punk teenager finding heaven a bore: "God looks like a guidance counselor, God's got that smile." Soon through all the vapid sneering, the utter waste of this young life, and so many like it, begins to dominate the sassy text; all the cleverness becomes very, very sad. It is an uncommonly powerful song, brilliant in its ability to turn its own sarcastic tone to such somber, meaningful use.

Williams loves such high-contrast juxtapositions.  As her fans might guess, she has been more influenced by literary talents than musical ones. In fact, her musical travels have already inspired her first book, a busy guide to over 700 natural food stores in the country, called The Tofu Tollbooth (Ardwork Press; Box 814; Northampton, MA  01061-0814).

Williams Carlos Williams is mentioned first as literary influence, admired "as someone with a foot in the very practical world who was also a poet; both a general fractioned and a poet."  Next She cited Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, and Tom Wolfe.  "I love all of those 60's disillusioned writers. They have all these anti-heroes and are in this constant existential crisis, and yet they are so committed to their art and to finding out the humor and soul of a situation."

"Heller wrote something that influenced me so much.  He used two words that were very different to describe something, that something was a very disturbing and gentle experience. The idea that you could juxtapose words like that as a way of trying to encapsulate the duality of something was really valuable to me as an artist.  He dared to put it all in one line if that's the way he perceived it."

Williams grew up around the fold music of the 60's, remembered her closest family times sitting on the big couch talking and singing to the soothing sounds of Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell and the Byrds on the Stereo.  The simple, melodic order of the music was pleasing to her 4 year-old sensibilities, she recalled.  At 6, she had a real epiphany when, suddenly, the lyrics of a Judy Collins record came into focus for her.  She realized these songs were about real things; that the lyrics fit he moods and colors of the melody.

Though her parents actually nudged her towards folk singing, and everyone in her family believed that some career in the arts was inevitable, she never gave songwriting much thought.  She was drawn to theater, to its complexity and dramatic range.  "I really did grow up in a Top-40 environment.  It didn't occur to me that you could have such a theatrical experience with music, that you could have so many well drawn characters and concepts and themes; that it could be literature."

The strong spirituality and moral vision that informs all her writing was stoked by her involvement in a nearby Quaker meeting.  Though her parents were secular if not atheistic, she was drawn to such themes, and ended up majoring in theater and religion at Wesleyan University.  She began writing show tunes for her theater studies, then satires and parodies for fun.   She remembers her first folk-like effort as an anthemic spoof called "If we could all have sex together." From such and unpromising start, almost without knowing it, she grew more serious about songwriting.

"I had a theater professor who said something that was a real relief to me in the midst of all the ego-stuff in the theatre department.  He said, you know, Samuel Beckett didn't write plays to be really cool. He really had to write those plays. And I really had to write these songs, but I didn't want to be self-indulgent.  It's a gift to me that, when I finally wrote a personal song in the midst of all those other songs I was writing, my friends said, that's the one we like, that's the path you should take; you should take yourself seriously.  I realized that there was a desire for a personal connection in my music, that I should be more open about myself and stick to things that I knew about."

"Also, I think I'm a little bit weird in that if I, say, decide to write a song about the Persian Gulf War, it's inevitably not about, you know, the troops go marching in the and tanks and the guns.  It's about looking around me and sensing this crumbling wall of trust in the country, which I see within my very personal circle.  So in that sense, I never thought topical was the best way to approach thing, because it was too direct."

And yet she knows she is something of a topical songwriter.  Her sons are about very real, very human issues that affect everybody.  The only point in the interview where she disdain or sarcasm was when she talked about her dislike of the "journal-entry songs" she feels too many of today's introspective songwriters produce.  "I have really sought not to submit journal entries to an audience. So I tend to distill some things after the fact, after I've more or less digested it personally."

"But I also think that writing sings is one the most personal things that I allow myself to do, because, even though I put a lot of care into trying to get the right lyric and the right word - to the craft- they're very important to me personally to write.   I thought "When I was a boy" would be an enormous flop, because I felt like I was the only one like that growing up in my school. I thought the boys were boys and the girls were girls, and here I was playing sports with the boys and being more grubby than most of the kids. I had no idea I was going to hit a nerve with so many people.  I've sung that song for real girly-girls from my past, and they say they can relate to that song.  And it really surprised me that it resonated so much with men.  Two or three men I had always associated with being very emotionally masked, sort of notoriously so, found me at a quiet moment and said, you know, I was a girl. The ones I knew who were the most emotionally guarded were the ones who made a special point of being very direct with me about how this song had affected them."

After college, Williams worked for a year as stage manager with the Opera Company of Boston.  Drawn increasingly to singing and songwriting, she slowly, shyly began doing open stages and meeting the area's prolific and supportive songwriting community.  The more she saw what a community it was, despite the competitiveness that any scene so crowded must have, the more she thought back on her long relationship with folk music and saw that all the passions that guided her- theater, poetry, music, history, spirituality, moral purpose, romanticism, humor and, yes, a fondness for being quirky and surprising - were abundantly available to her as a singer songwriter.
 

Her deceptively simple, softly pretty voice is already a remarkable emotional tool.  She uses her falsetto so many ways for emotional shading and color, sliding warmly to it for a plaintive mood, cracking harshly to it to underline darker feelings.  Always, her phrasing is conventionally clear, convincing and believable.  Because, unlike so many twenty-something singers, she makes no attempt to age her voice, and because she is always serving the lyric, people might miss what a canny and complex vocalist she really is.

Williams lives in Northampton, Massachusetts now, far enough from the busy hive of Boston (which she refers to as the Boot Camp of Folk) to feel free of its professional intensity; near enough to stay in tough with her many songwriter friends there.  If she sounds precocious, it is not so much in the serenely sure way she discusses her craft, her deep belief in this music, or the clam way she admits her shortcomings. It is more in a quite contentment and long-range vision she imparts which would be rare in an artist twice her age.  One strongly senses this it the new face that is going to be around for a long, long time.

“Sometimes I say I’m only as confident as my last song.” She said matter-of-factly, “and the last song I wrote is a little on the vague side. It’s called “Southern California wants to be Western New York,” and it’s clever, I think; top-heavy, too filled with little clever-isms and too little lasting value. So I’m afraid I may have to jettison it.  I think an audience member has to do too much footwork to keep up with it.  To do all that to keep up with a song that, inevitably, is just clever, I think is too much.  You’re always concerned about whether you’re compromising yourself, whether you’re honest, whether you’re evolving, if you’re afraid to evolve. So I have the confidence that I don’t really like thinking in clichés, that I prefer to write songs from a place where I have some perspective, some valuable reflection.”

She puffs a deep breath or two, letting her thoughts catch up with the spill of words. “Maybe it goes back to listening to Judy Collins on the couch, being surprised by how much this had to do with my life.  Where would it have sufficed for it to have been the backdrop for my life, the way melodies on the top-40 radio are, this was an experience I could really share with this song; this song really had a life beyond itself.”

-30-

Thanks to Gerry Lang for the transcription