The Vancouver Province

Thursday, October 5, 2000

PAGE B21

New CD full of evocative, extraordinarily well-written and poignant songs

By John P. McLaughlin

The Province

The first, most-notable thing about Dar Williams’ remarkable new album, her fourth and the first since 1997, is its title, The Green World.

It conjures up a Greenpeace canvasser’s secret fantasy, a primordial picture of canopies of lush foliage covering creatures great and small that burrow in the rich loam and nuzzle contentedly the livelong day. It’s a very nice picture but it’s wrong.

Instead, Williams is referring to a concept she learned while studying Shakespeare at university, where the bards of the day often wrote about the conflict between the "closed" and "green" worlds.

The closed world was court life in Elizabethan England while the green world was the scary and unpredictable chaos that thrived in the forest beyond.

Characters were thrust in the green world to learn things they didn’t necessarily want to so that they might return to the closed world and grow and evolve. Or not, depending on the plot of the play.

"Getting a flat tire in a bad part of town, that’s being in the green world," says Williams.

And many of the situations in Williams’ new batch of evocative, poignant and extraordinarily well-written songs, where people are battling death, surviving cults or muddling through their day to day, are her green- world events.

Williams is an upstate New York kid who grew up in an educated, liberal-arts home devoid of formal religion yet went on to major in religious studies in university. In her music, she frequently delves into matters spiritual, also a scary world for many.

And she’s not surprised frequently to find a deep spiritual connection with the audience when performing her songs.

"The best nights," she says, "are when I can subordinate my ego to the song and find something new and resonant about it. I hear the audience hearing it and I hear myself hearing it and we are very much together and yet in this very ritualized space. And that’s a very big deal; it’s everything that I aspire to."

The one song you likely won’t hear from the new record, unless Williams pulls it out, is the intriguingly titled O’Canada Girls. That’s because it’s only included on a premium, limited-edition, fancy wrapped, heavily annotated version of The Green World available on the Internet (www.razor andtie.com/greenworld).

But Williams doesn’t mind if you go rooting around the green world of Napster to find the song because, well, she’s a little embarrassed.

"Yeah, I feel bad," says Williams, "because in Canada, after you’ve kinda gone through the dollar dance and the tariffs and the schlep of ordering it, it’s so expensive. I feel like a schmuck.

"Everything in the song I got from coming up and playing there, I’ve had really strong experiences there," she says.

"There is a sense that I’m playing for people that respect their own creativity and don’t replace it with their fan-dom. I mean, we’re all trying to hold onto various cultural habits and not be co-opted by The Gap and it seems like Canada’s winning the fight better."