Dar Williams

Dar Williams (full name Dorothy Snowden Williams, born 1967) is an American singer-songwriter specializing in what can be described as "folk-pop".

She is a frequent performer at folk festivals across the nation, such as the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in Hillsdale, New York. She has also toured with such artists as Mary Chapin Carpenter, Patty Griffin, Ani DiFranco, The Nields, Shawn Colvin, Girlyman, Joan Baez, and Catie Curtis.

Biography

Williams was born in Mount Kisco, New York, and grew up in Chappaqua with two older sisters, Meredith and Julie. In interviews, she has described her parents as "liberal and loving" people who early on encouraged a career in songwriting. Williams began playing the guitar at age nine and wrote her first song two years later. However, she was far more interested in drama at the time, and majored in theater and religion at Wesleyan University.

Williams moved to Boston, Massachusetts in 1990 to further explore a career in theater. She worked for a year as stage manager of the Opera Company of Boston, but on the side began to write songs, record demo tapes, and take voice lessons. Her voice teacher encouraged her to try performing at coffeehouses, but her early years performing were made difficulty by the intimidating nature of the Boston folk music scene, as well as her own battle with stage fright. In 1993 Williams moved to Northampton, Massachusetts.

Early in Williams's music career, she opened for Joan Baez, who would make her relatively well known by recording some of her songs. Her growing popularity has since relied heavily on community coffeehouses, public radio, and an extensive fan base on the Internet. In recent years, she has performed on nationwide television shows such as Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

Williams recorded her first full album, The Honesty Room, under her own label, Burning Field Music. Guest artists included Nerissa and Katryna Nields and Gideon Freudmann. The album was soon picked up by Waterbug Records. In 1995, she moved to Razor & Tie, and her first album for that label, 1996's Mortal City received substantial notice, partially due to the fact that it coincided with her tour with Baez. The album again featured guest appearances by the Nields sisters and Freudmann, as well as noted folk artists John Prine, Cliff Eberhardt and Lucy Kaplansky. With that success, Razor & Tie re-released The Honesty Room. By the time of her third release, End of The Summer (1997), Williams' career had gathered substantial momentum, and the album did remarkably well, given its genre and independent label status.

In 1998, Williams, Richard Shindell and Lucy Kaplansky formed the group Cry Cry Cry as a way to pay homage to some of their favorite folk artists. The band released an eponymous album of covers and toured from 1998 to 2000.

She has since released three more studio albums on the Razor & Tie label (The Green World (2000), The Beauty of the Rain (2003), and My Better Self (2005)), as well as a live album (Out There Live (2001)).

Williams has lent her talent and support to various causes, founding the Snowden Environmental Trust and taking part in many benefit concerts. She performed in a show at Alcatraz with Baez and the Indigo Girls, to benefit the prisoner-rights group Bread and Roses.

On May 4, 2002, she married Michael Robinson, an old friend from college. Their son, Stephen Gray Robinson, was born on April 24, 2004. She currently resides in Rhinebeck, New York.

Dar on Songwriting

Williams has long maintained in interviews that she wants her music to be an "efficient career," and something she can do her entire life. She strives to accomplish this by "continuously court[ing] your muse; to keep writing stuff that feels risky about things you believe in, that you're really feeling." Williams says that she can't stand songwriting clichés and instead "digs deeper" into the meanings of things to find their inner beauty. She detests "journal entry songs" and prefers to write for and about others.

The specificity of her lyrics (e.g., in presenting narratives or describing characters or incidents), however, has led many listeners to presume that her songs are strongly autobiographical. For years, fans argued over Williams's sexual orientation; songs such as "Iowa" and "As Cool As I Am" were assumed by many to describe lesbian relationships. After a magazine described her as bisexual, Williams publicly clarified that she was heterosexual, though she would have preferred to have "stayed ambiguous ... for the sake of solidarity" and artistic communion.

Songs

A 2001 article in The Advocate discussed Williams' popularity among LGBT people, writing that among LGBT-supportive straight songwriters, "few manage in their lyrics to dig as deeply or as authentically as... Williams does".

Recurrent themes in Williams's songs include religion, adolescence, gender issues, anti-commercialism, misunderstood relationships, loss, humor, and geography.

Williams' early work spoke clearly of her upbringing in 1970s and 80s suburbia -- of alienation, and the hypocrisy evident in the post-WWII middle class. On the track "Anthem" on her early tape All My Heroes are Dead, she sang, "I know there's blood in the pavement and we've turned the fields to sand."

Williams was never afraid to address gender typing, roles, and inequities. "You're Aging Well" on The Honesty Room discusses adolescent body image, ageism and self-loathing in excruciating detail. The song ended with the singer finding an unnamed female mentor who pointed her toward a more enlightened and mature point of view. Joan Baez covered the song in concert and later duetted with Williams on tours.

"When I Was a Boy", also on The Honesty Room, uses Williams' own childhood experiences as a tomboy to muse on gender roles and how they limit boys and girls, who then become limited men and women.

"The Christians and Pagans" on Mortal City simultaneously tackles both religion and sexual orientation through a tale of a lesbian/pagan couple that chooses to spend solstice with the devout Christian uncle of one of the women, thus creating a situation where people who would oppose each other on almost every political and cultural front try to get by on pure politeness. Throughout the song, the family members begin to discover their differences need not estrange them from one another.

In an interview in 2007 on the Food Is Not Love podcast, she said that the song "February" from Mortal City was one of her songs that she liked best. She referred to the way the song "kept on evolving into, not only what I wanted to say, but what I wanted to say and didn't even know was in there." She liked the way the song "kept on breaking its own rules in a way that art is all about."

Williams' relationship with her family is hinted at through several songs, perhaps most notably in "After All" off The Green World. The song appears to deal mainly with her depression at the age of twenty-one, referring to it as a "winter machine that you go through" repeatedly while "everyone else is spring-bound." It also hints at a history of physical abuse suffered by her parents, which ironically helps to give some closure and perspective to Williams' own personal struggles.

Later Work

Williams' latest two albums, The Beauty of the Rain and My Better Self, are characterized by more lush arrangements, guest artists, movement away from the tropes and techniques of folk song-writing, and the wry sensibility of a mature woman looking at her life, rather than a young woman trying to handle her upbringing. The Beauty of the Rain features some of her most accomplished songwriting to date. The title track is almost a haiku, discussing how an unnamed person operates from fear in a relationship, and thus loses his or her partner, and how this person fails to understand that the process of relating is what love is:

You don't know the next thing you will say
This is your favorite kind of day
It has no walls
The beauty of the rain
Is how it falls, how it falls, how it falls

Williams addresses the subject of motherhood in "The One Who Knows," although she would not become a mother until two years after writing the song:

All the things you treasure most
will be the hardest won.
I will watch you struggle long
before the answers come.
But I won't make it harder,
I'll be there to cheer you on.

And the chorus:

You'll fly away, but take my hand until that day.
So when they ask how far love goes
When my job's done you'll be the one who knows.

In "The Mercy of the Fallen", she makes the assertion that those who have erred and been damaged, who have been humbled, bring a worthy lack of judgment to relationships:

There's the wind and the rain
And the mercy of the fallen
Who say they have no claim to know what's right
There's the weak and the strong
And the beds that have no answer
And that's where I may rest my head tonight

Her most recent CD, My Better Self, features two covers: Neil Young's "Everybody Knows This is Nowhere", and Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb". Williams believes that it is all too easy for people to get lulled by the comfort of their routines, and so chose to record the latter song as a "reminder to wakeup" and take responsibility for the problems in our world.

She returns to her folk roots with "Teen for God", an upbeat, thoughtful, skewering of the probable reality of teenage Bible camps:

Dear Lord, I plan each day
By the things I will not do or say
But I'm driven by a passion
Is it only there to tame?

Trivia

• The nickname "Dar" has erroneously been thought to relate to the Daughters of the American Revolution, which is mentioned in the song "Flinty Kind of Woman." However, it actually originated due to a mispronunciation of "Dorothy" by one of Williams's sisters.

• Williams is allergic to dairy products. As someone who has toured a great deal of the time and had trouble finding suitable dining on the road, Williams was inspired to write and publish a directory of natural food stores and restaurants called The Tofu Tollbooth in 1994. In 1998 Williams co-authored a second edition with Elizabeth Zipern.

• While writing songs for her album The Green World, Williams incorporated her ongoing interest in religion into the process. One particular inspiration was the book Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler.

Discography

• I Have No History (1990 - rare demo tape)
• All My Heroes are Dead (1991 - rare demo tape)
• The Honesty Room (1993)
• Mortal City (1996)
• End of The Summer (1997)
• Cry Cry Cry (1998, with Richard Shindell and Lucy Kaplansky)
• The Green World (2000)
• Out There Live (2001)
• The Beauty of the Rain (2003)
• My Better Self (2005)

Bibliography

• The Tofu Tollbooth (1998, co-author)
• Amalee (May 2004)
• Lights, Camera, Amalee (July 2006)

External links

• Dar Williams Official Site
• DarWilliams.net - Extensive website maintained by a Dar Williams fan
• Dar Williams MySpace
• Dar Williams Eventful
• Dar Williams You Tube