ONE OF LILITHS FAIREST IS TRAVELING THE SOLO ROAD
by Vickie Gilmer
 

"Unfortunatly, I'm running around naked, and dripping wet" says Dar Williams by way of apology for her tardy telephone call.
Calling from Northampton MA where she is midway through a three day stint near her old Beantown stomping grounds, Williams is flying solo after a few months of feminine mystique and muscle with the Lilith Fair staying on the road that never ends and criss-crossing the country in a month and a half.
A promising singer-songwriter, Williams has earned herself a solid cache of fans drawn to her literate and witty stories, gently cascading melodies bittersweet sentiments and honest, but tough attitude.
With a third album on the shelves, she's on the same arduous journey the Indigo Girls, Shawn Colvin, and Ani Difranco have undertaken. It has served those artists well and its a trip Dar Williams also is sure to complete sucessfully.
Trying to forge a career in theatre during her college years, Williams found little support in the Boston area for intinerant playwrights and not being the least bit shy, she set out to tackle local stages.
"I'd get up and sing open mike anyday, any night, if you could bear it," Williams says.
"There were so many music scenes in Boston, and radio was supporting folk singing, which is unusual." The benevolent support Williams recieved led her to Razor and Tie, a New York-based label that specializes in reissues and has a small roster of artists that also includes Francis Dunnery, Marshall Crenshaw and Graham Parker.
Razor and Tie offered Williams the ablility to record her music her way -- music fueled by passion and wit without and overt emphasis on mass commercial appeal. But success has not eluded Williams. a number of web sites are dedicated to Williams, her 3 albums have been sucessful by indie standards (selling upward of 200,00 copies) and shes doing it the same way DiFranco did -- through word of mouth and month-long stints on the road.
"It might have something to do with the fact that the boomers are starting to come back to live performances, and the kids of boomers are asking for more from their music than they've got from commericial channels," Williams says.
"The commerical world is sort of scrambling to keep up with that, and its more suspicious. Intelligent listeners, who like to get around the system and find music on their own, who feed off the word of mouth to find unusual things, are not really relying as much on the central marketing structures."
But it's Williams music that speaks louder than the fans adulary applause or critics praise. Her first two albums "The Honesty Room" and "Mortal City" capture Williams purest folk strains but her latest "The End of the Summer" is more sonically expansive, incorporating everything from dobro, pedal steel and electric guitars to pandeiro and bouzouki.
Yet Williams' discerning eye for detail, which defines her exemplary prose, remains intact.
"Are you out there" rides a soothing, mesmerizing beat and is a sentimental call-out to late night djs. "What do you hear in these sounds"  is an acerbic tale of therapy, that contains the salient lyric "but oh how i loved everybody else, when i finally got to talk so much about myself."
"Party generation" spins Pepsi ads with the fratlike chorus from Razor and Tie staffers and takes to task adults who refuse to grow up and the tender "If I wrote you" is a wistful ballad, hollowed with an aching pain as strong as the song's character hedges on revealing herself with letters penned but never sent.
With a strong network behind her and a growing group of women performers generating national attention, Williams feels secure in her current situation and optimistic about the future.
"There's so many woman at the top of the heap that there has been (before), so that's encouraging" Williams says. "I'm not scraping by. In the perception of the superstar career, I'm pretty eclipsed but thats what exciting- that there's this whole way of having a complete career thats flying by under the radar. I feel like I have a solid following, and I'm able to get by through the networks that are not sexist, or are much less so. My sacrifice in the long run is that superstar, Barbie kind of life but what I gain is my livelihood and my art, and actually, my audience."