Dar & Her Guitar

by Elizabeth Beauvais

photo by Huntley Garriott

I suppose if one politely asked Dar Williams' songs to assemble themselves into assorted characterizing containers, her lyrical myriad of wry stories and pensive ballads would acquiesce, squeezing themselves beneath descriptive headings like "introspective wit" and "poignant wisdom." But in all fairness, it's damn near impossible to define the work of an artist like Dar Williams, and I for one am glad. Her detailed narrative lyrics range from the contrast of androgynous childhood and sex-based consumerized womanhood in "When I Was A Boy" to spirited twilight existentialism, fighting through the shrubbery of suburban alienation in "Are You Out There?"

With three albums as successful as they are diverse, Williams arises as an engaging new wordsmith in the folk realm. Her charismatic and intimate three-octave range is adept enough both to craft delicate ballads like "If I Wrote You" and to drive gritty, churned-up numbers like "The Ocean." To get to know her work is to meet a motley troupe of characters, all of 'em keenly, achingly honest. "What Do You Hear in these Sounds?" depicts the intimacy and vulnerability of therapy: "And we fathom all the mysteries, explicit and inherent/When I hit a rut/She says to try the other parent." In "Iowa," an uptight narrator vents wistful yearnings while driving through an evocative, bosomy midwestern landscape: "How I long to fall just a little bit,/ to dance out of the lines and stray from the light." In "As Cool As I Am," the chorus, "I will not be afraid of women," separates dizzying wordy rushes of truth and candor: "You look out of the kitchen window and you shake your head and say low/'If I could believe that stuff, I'd say that woman has a halo,'/ And I look out and say, 'Yeah, she's really blond'/And then I go outside to join the others/I am the others."

Dar Williams appeared to a full house at Trax last Saturday in a rare solo performance, following the end of an intensive six week national tour with a strong back-up band to promote her newest and most complex album, The End of Summer. An increasingly large constituency of US and UK contemporary folk fans avidly follows Dar Williams, including several webpages and an overflowing 'Net "Darlist" with over 1,000 daily subscribers. So with the crafty doggedness as one of her most ardent "Darlisting" fans, I wrangled a long interview with the insightful and witty Dar at our very own Self-Conscious Corner Coffeehouse. She spoke to me about growing up artistically and musically in the folk community, about the insight behind her songwriting, and of the values and ideas driving her art, while I tried desperately to keep my cool and sip cappuccino without getting foam on my upper lip.

dec: When did you decide to dedicate yourself to becoming a singer/songwriter?

dar: It was a pretty clear point. I was a theater major in college and wrote songs for plays. After college, in my secret dreams I wanted to be a folksinger, but I also wanted to continue to write plays and possibly be an opera director. So I went to an opera company, but I really missed singing. Meanwhile, I was discovering what a lousy theater town Boston was because the press spitefully crushed all the new initiative of young theater groups. But the folk scene was really taking off. This was a world where I could get up on a stage for an open mic every night. There was a lot of folk music on the air; the Boston Globe was very supportive of folk music, and there were a lot of coffee houses and communities with opening slots and tip-jar gigs. The whole layering of communities to grow and start working as an artist was there. I was getting my own little gigs here and there; the first year I made $75 for opening for Patty Griffin twice. Sometime in 1992 I decided to dedicate myself to becoming a folksinger and songwriter.

dec: What sort of exchange of ideas and support currently exists in the folk community?

dar: There's a lot. You can initiate a lot. I was in a songwriting group in Western Massachussetts and a songwriting group in Boston, and they had about as much a mixture of tension and growth as you would expect. I moved from Boston to Western Mass. because I sensed that it was becoming too vertical, that I had been assigned my lower rung. Even if I deserved my lower rung, I needed to become a better writer, and I realized that I'm only going to become a better writer if I'm surrounded by woods and trees. So I went out to Western Mass. to write and discovered a small group of people who were doing the same thing. And now a lot of others are moving out to Western Mass. from Boston, so now we have our group, but because we're working artists, what we sit around and talk about is gigs, cities, travels, and music that we love. In Boston, we were all poor and very competitive. In Western Mass., we can't be competitive because we've already succeeded by being ourselves, on our own terms.

dec: Can you explain why you haven't moved to a major record company?

dar: What I would love is to have a very established reputation, so that when I retire I could just be in the world as an individual rather than tied to one particular genre or another. Before I opened for Sarah McLachlan last week, I felt like I was this cat and she was a lion, like my career was a smaller version of hers. But after that situation, I feel more like I'm a cat and she's a giraffe -- it's a really different career. The big word with my label (Razor and Tie) is organic. In working with my manager, my career has grown successfully organically, and it truly has everything to do with how I believe farming should be done, and seas should be fished, and communities should be grown. And, sure, there're definitely organic limitations to that. Being the crown jewel of a major label is great, but being forgotten by a major label is horrible; it's demoralizing, and it's not worth it. Then it's like you're aligning yourself with the corporate culture for nothing. It's the worst of both worlds: it did nothing for you, and you're the spokesperson for a way of doing things that's based more on commerce than communication. Then you just feel like an asshole. I feel that being with my management team, my booking agents, and record label keeps me honest; it's like there's an alternative economy mission I'm on.

dec: On your first two albums, your singing and guitar playing were the primary angle for the songs. In The End of Summer, however, you employ several different techniques that are less traditional, yielding a more "produced" sound. What provoked these changes?

dar: In songs like "Party Generation" and "Are You Out There?" I had these certain beats in the back of my mind that served a particular purpose to the song, but they weren't your normal Dar songs, so they weren't going to be produced the way others were. They needed a pop rock production. I'm not prolific enough to look at a body of 25 songs and pick 10 and say, 'Okay, these are the most consistent.' I just have to put out what the Muse brings me.

dec: So is The End of Summer evolutionary or experimental?

dar: I think it's evolutionary. I think the Muse said, "Let's go back to your teenage years." The theme of the record covers the time between 15 and 22, when I started trying to cope with depression and began to learn how to deal with it, as well as that sort of garden variety depression kids deal with in high school. "Road Buddy," for instance, is narrated by a 17 or 18-year-old who's dealing with the interfacing of that American mythology of the road and deciding what does make you grow up and what doesn't. And because that was a time when I was listening to a lot of pop music, a lot of pop made it in. Now, I'm surrounded by a lot of New England folk music -- beautiful folk music -- and gorgeous woods and a real reverence for nature -- I feel like that will probably make it into the next album. So my albums reflect what's in my path.

dec: Do you feel a tension between the sense that you need to maintain a sort of integrity in being true to your folk roots and a desire to experiment as a creative individual?

dar: No. You know when you're going out with somebody and you know you need to break up and you think, "Oh my god, this is awful," because you know you have to do it? When you realize that you have to make a decision, and you also realize that probably no one will support you, and it's your own growth and honesty at stake -- it just gives you cramps. I had to write the song "As Cool as I Am;" I had to write the song "When I was a Boy," and I was quite positive that they would be controversial and even archival. As it turns out, they are the songs people seem to love the most.

dec: Absolutely. As both a single and music video, "As Cool As I Am" is definitely one of your most popular and stirring songs. What is the story behind it?

dar: A friend of mine, who is often envied for her beauty and magnetic personality, was dating someone who was really not dynamic at all. He projected all of these neuroses on her until one day she literally stopped in her tracks and realized, "This a power thing." I once found myself in a similar situation when a lover was critical of me, comparing me to another friend in this pseudo-aesthetic way. And that kind of thing has nothing to do with aesthetics. It has nothing to do with someone saying, "You know, I really just love the form of the female breast." It's realizing, "No, you're saying that to make me feel really flat-chested." I feel like we all have a right to feel somewhat pissed off by being compared while in a relationship.

dec: How do ideas come to you?

dar: Probably the same way they come to you. I was running the other day and I passed this prison with the sign "House of Correction" and I thought, "my God, 'House of Correction' is a perfect metaphor for so many institutions, subtle and overt, in our society." I think that's where my songs come from -- small things that strike me. I was listening to a singer recently and thought to myself, "I really liked him better as a solo act," and then I got all choked up without knowing why and immediately wanted to write a song entitled "I really liked him better as a solo act." And I realized that [my reaction] was mostly about making this new album and how the people who have supported me from the beginning really mean a lot to me. That was the romance. They were there the nights when I would make $50 and say, "Oh, man!" and they'd respond, "You're worth it, Dar, we paid five dollars tonight." It was actually a way of acknowledging the people who wanted me to become successful for their own vicarious needs and who might in the future regret that they pushed because now I'm inaccessible. Hopefully I'm not inaccessible, but that's a real push-pull thing, and I didn't realize those motivations when I was entertaining the idea of writing a song like that. So I just have to keep my ears open, but I also really have to keep an open mind to continually ask myself, "Do I really want to write this? Do I really want to write a song about college campus cannabis activists ('The Pointless, Yet Poignant, Crisis of a Co-ed')?"

dec: You position the voice of many of your songs among a variety of characters from the thirty-year-old beer commercial party guy to a lesbian pagan visiting her conservative Christian uncle over Christmas. Is this your theater background taking center stage?

dar: I think so. I love stories. I love drama. And I love the conflict of narrative -- the things that get said and don't get said. Like in the "Christians and the Pagans" -- the way that the aunt pops up from the table in an awkward situation. Or the way the uncle thinks of calling his brother who he hadn't spoken to in a year -- some issues come forward that don't really relate so much to thinking about his lesbian pagan niece but makes him think about himself -- she's just the catalyst. Raymond Carver is Mr. Take-a-turn-you-don't-expect, and I was reading a lot of him before writing this song. And theater is very much that way, you think that we're talking in symbols and then we're not, or we're talking in much wider symbols ... one person has the transformation when you really thought someone else would transform -- I love that. So if I can make those kinds of turns in a song, then I'm very lucky.

dec: So many of your songs draw upon the creativity of childhood. Do you feel that reflecting on childhood and adolescence can be a learning experience for us?

dar: Yes. You know, Norman Mailer always said, "Don't write about you childhood. It's a dead end street and you'll burn out -- it's such a finite subject." He might be right, but to me, it's infinite. Especially when you're from the suburbs; it's not just looking at your own childhood, it's looking at indigenous cultures that have been planted very inorganically. It's looking at a lot of structures and systems in adolescence, or looking at how college really works for us and how it really doesn't. A lot of my reflection on my youth is really a reflection on the community from which it sprang, and that, I think, creates a road map for the feelings of the lyrics. It's not epic, I'm just finding universal values by going into a domestic, intimate setting. It [childhood] is often my vehicle -- and it's a very useful vehicle for me.

dec: "When I was a Boy" is such a powerfully poignant song, with so many identity issues layered within it. Had it simmered within you long before it made its way into lyrics?

dar: Yes, I think it had simmered for a while because so much kindled around the phrase "when I was a boy" as opposed to "when I was a tomboy" or "when I was like a boy." "When I was a boy" forms the bridge between a mystical childhood and the ridiculousness of the ways women are pushed. All of that consumer-driven comparison to other women really feels so unnatural. Why would you ask me to put implants in? I'm a tree-climber; those would get in the way. Besides, it really doesn't work for men to ask you to put in plastic implants in terms of the idea of partnership. ["When I Was a Boy"] is about being profoundly misunderstood in comparison to a completely androgynous childhood. Instead of arguing that on explicit feminist terms, the song is arguing that on the reality of our childhood.

dec: On humanist terms?

dar: Yes, definitely.

dec: And so, from a humanist vantage, Dar, would you say you are a dog or a cat person?

dar: You know, I grew up a cat person, but now I am a total dog person. Dogs are like kids, they're just so excited. Of course, when cats are like dogs, I like them.

dec: And there are a few puppy-cats out there.

dar: True. But just a few.