Dar Williams
SELF-PORTRAIT Activist, Tunesmith, and New Mom, Dar Williams Digs Deep on My Better Self
For the past decade, Dar Williams has been one of the most vibrant, multi-dimensional voices on the folk-rock scene. A steadfast environmentalist, she's penned some gorgeous paeans to the wonders of nature -- and plenty of provocative political missives targeting those who'd threaten them. On the other hand, she's also brought forth a slew of gentle love songs -- some directed at romantic partners, some, more recent, written for her infant son. Her topics may not seem too surprising, but her way of avoiding heavy-handedness is -- you'd be hard-pressed to find anything overweening or didactic on Williams's most recent disc, My Better Self. What you will find is a stylistic mix: some electric blues, some neo–Brill Building pop, and some intriguing covers (Neil Young's "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere," Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb"). Dar Williams paused recently to give Barnes & Noble.com's David Sprague some insight into her better self.
Barnes & Noble.com: My Better Self has a lot of highly charged songs, in terms of social consciousness. What put you in a space to write those?
Dar Williams: I think this album culminated in a certain temperature reading of the time that we're in, and the time that I'm in. I'm sort of settling in: I just had a baby, and I'm coming to terms with how that's going to play into my life as an artist. I'm also in a macro situation where there's a lot of anxiety on the planet, this very color-coded, alert-oriented world. Everyone has their opinion of what that looks like, and this is mine.
B&N.com: Are you aware of trying to balance political songs with other sorts of things, to strike a balance in a way?
DW: Songs come to me in a very nuanced, unexpected way. Most of the time, a line will come to me, and if it's an observation of a political situation, I'll go that way. If it's about a couple of potheads in college, I'll go that way. I've learned to take that seriously -- to follow an impulse and assume if it comes to my head in a whimsical way, it will turn into a song that has poetic value and isn't just a didactic need to slam everyone over the head with some big idea I think they should hear.
B&N.com: Do you think that, when you do have those big ideas, you can make a difference with them?
DW: A lot of people have asked me if it bugs me that I'm singing to the converted, and I don't really get that. First of all, I don't really know what "the converted" means. Even if you're in a religion, you have to go to church every week. [laughs] Hopefully, you help people galvanize their ideas and remind them of their values. Music has functioned for me that way. In my life, as I get older, I'm tempted in this way or that way, but I'm reminded that I believe in love and humanity and neighborliness. It's the lyrics of songs, and even the music in songs that have kept that in place.
B&N.com: You sing very lovingly about your current home, New York City, on "The Hudson." As someone who's moved around a lot, are you very affected by your environment?
DW: For some reason or other, I have a really hard time feeling connected to certain things. Maybe it's because, growing up in this world, one is encouraged to find one's rituals and one's friends and not be so affected by the pine trees or the river. The truth is, these things work their magic on us invisibly, so as an adult, I will come to see that I gravitate toward certain things. When I wrote "The Hudson," it was in gratitude that this river has kept me coming back to it and kept my sense of history very rich and layered and important. It really helped give me a sense of place.
B&N.com: How did you come to cover "Comfortably Numb"?
DW: I heard the lyrics to "Comfortably Numb" one night, very late, when I was coming back from a gig, and I couldn't believe how deep they were -- and in a funny way, how feminine they were. It sort of juxtaposes the efficiency of getting onstage -- it's time to go, I'll just give you this shot, you'll feel better -- with this disembodied voice saying, "I remember what it felt like to feel more." I felt that if a woman sang it, it would really play up the melancholy, make it a really timely commentary about a time when we weren't so anaesthetized, when we experienced more. When Ani DiFranco added her part, it really crystallized the piece.
B&N.com: Had you worked with her before?
DW: I opened for Ani early on in my career, then again in 1998, so we cross paths a lot. But I felt shy about asking her to do this because she's so busy. You get the sense that she's such a wonderful, poetic force of nature, you don't want to get in the way of this great torrent of talent. But it's a nice symbolic moment to be collaborating with her because I love her both personally and professionally.
B&N.com: My Better Self seems like some sort of culmination of your effort to expand your stylistic range -- as opposed to playing pure folk music end to end.
DW: I think, as you learn who to trust in the world, you know who to ask when you're developing a song. Some people will tell you not to take chances and others will say, "Go for it." All the songs that were risks for me, on this album, were met by the people I brought them to with encouragement. That's a big part of it. Somewhere on the tour bus -- I think it was in North Carolina -- a few lines of a blues song came to me and my keyboard player, Julie, really helped that come along. The same goes for a very sort of Burt Bacharach[–style] song I wrote for a friend who really loves Burt Bacharach.
B&N.com: How did the album's title present itself to you?
DW: I had a really hard time coming up with a title, and went through a lot of them. It turned out that during the photo shoot, I'd popped this blue gumball in my mouth even though everyone was going, "No, no!," realizing my mouth would be blue for the rest of the shoot. So we decided to do the shots anyway, emphasizing how blue my mouth was. My manager was actually the one who suggested using those photos to illustrate the title -- which comes from the song "I'll Miss You 'Til I Meet You," where the woman is singing to this nonexistent person. She's saying, "Can you keep me awake, I think you could help, just to find my way, find my better self." I thought that was a particularly speculative way to identify the album. I'm trying to find my better self, and Lord knows, I probably won't find out what that is while I'm alive.
September 2005
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