InsideOut: Interview with Dar Williams

by Owen Lipstein, Bethany Saltman and Amanda Schmidt September/October 2008



Born and bred in and around the valley, Dar Williams’ career as a singer-songwriter is impressive. She began playing the Boston coffeehouse scene in the 1990s, but it wasn’t long before she was discovered by Joan Baez. In addition to recording 10 albums, Dar has also written children’s books and a guide to finding health food on the highway. She talks about gardening and songwriting with the same infectious passion.

We’re proud to call her one of ours.



InsideOut: I want to ask you about the title of your new album, “The Promised Land.” A lot of people are freaked out by the direction of the world, and you sound very optimistic.



Dar Williams: I am very optimistic, but it’s existential. The promised land is actually an existential idea for me, because it’s up to us to decide if we’re there yet or what we need to do to make it happen.



If you look at what’s going on right now in the Hudson Valley, in my garden, we have officially gone over the crazy meter with our string beans, and the tomatoes are starting to come in, and every night we have two or three things from the garden. The whole Hudson Valley is really beautiful, and filled with interesting minds, and things growing out of the ground, and networks—food networks and artistic networks, striving. In a way, we are already there, and our job is to celebrate that and to sustain it the best we can. So yeah, I would say there’s a lot of optimism, [but] it’s almost…a caveat—[that] we don’t feel too religiously entitled about it.



IO: What do you mean by entitled?



DW: If you feel like something is given to you and you have no responsibility to it, and you feel like your only job is to fight for it with weapons because you feel like it’s yours; if you don’t have to actually live up to the promise of the land itself. That’s entitlement. And then if you live in a country where the war machinery is such that if you really wanted to get into a war-like mindset, you could, really. There’s a huge industry to support your defensive posture. That’s entitled.

I live among a lot of artists who are thinkers and parents and gardeners, and who are working really hard to find some way to be sustainable and neighborly and thoughtful about how they live. I don’t consider that to be entitled. I consider that to be grateful. They own things. They own land. They are really trying to take care of stuff so they are not in their quiet moments saying, “Am I the problem, not the solution?”



IO: And do you think that the Hudson Valley is particularly promised in that sense?

DW: It is for me. It’s great to travel around the country and see the depth of a lot of slow food movements, different social movements, and community gardening movements and things like that. The Hudson Valley, to my mind, has the quality of surrender to it. It’s such a mammoth…There’s such a history and a beauty, and even prosperity, in terms of just the dirt on the ground. You’ve got your black earth around Goshen. It’s such a rich territory.



And I think you’ve got a lot of people who are really aware of that, and kind of walk around knowing what a great place we live in, and I think they are kind of awed by it. In that sense, I think the Hudson Valley is special. I [used to] live in a town where I was surrounded by people from ages 25 to 75, and they were all saying that they basically stayed in the Hudson Valley because they just can’t get enough of the view of the Hudson River from any given bridge.

I feel like people don’t come here to be the king of the turf. They come because it gives them so much.



IO: In this issue, Brigit Binns has written a wonderful piece about the questions that might arise when one is devoted to local, slow, home-grown food. She asks us to consider all the people who don’t have all these wonderful options, who are struggling to put any food on the table. How do you see all this bounty in relation to social justice?



DW: Gosh. I think that social justice and gardening are extremely compatible. Being a gardener has only made me a more generous person. It’s made me a less paranoid person. One day last year when the stock market was practically cut in half, I looked out at my garden and it looked so beautiful, and I thought, Well, I’ve always got this.



Being a locavore connects you to the land, it connects the kids to the land, it brings more color into your life, you share with your neighbors, you’re outside and you’re seeing more what your neighbors lives are like. Because we’re out in the garden, we are talking to our neighbors. We actually have a collective garden. Getting us outside and in the dirt turned out to be the best thing we could have done for our community.



I see the garden as the beginning of social justice, one of the remedies of trust. You are putting love in the food. There’s a spiritual aspect, there’s a community aspect, [and] there’s no looking at gardening and locavorism without looking at fossil fuel.



IO: You mentioned beginnings a minute ago. What was your introduction to music, and to singing and songwriting?



DW: I just decided to start writing a song when I was 11. It was interesting because it’s not dissimilar to how I write songs today. I love writing. I love being in the process when it’s going well. It’s like you are doing really well at a hard crossword puzzle. It’s daunting, and then suddenly you find the phrasing and the rhymes and the meaning of the song, and the why you ever wrote it to begin with.



I played guitar from age 9 or 10. I had the guitar, and my family was really into music, and we did a lot of singing. I was the third child, so I was given the responsibility of finding harmonies. Not just finding a melody and not just finding a harmony, but finding the second harmony. From a very early age, I was tuning in what I call my “half ears,” the little ears inside your ears that try to pick up nuance and cadences. I also—as the youngest—was that classic monkey child, and I loved to imitate things, and catch conversational rhythms and paradoxes in personalities and stuff.



IO: So many people play coffeehouses their whole lives. How did you move out of that?



DW: The truth is that having a broken heart didn’t hurt. Not because of pain, but because of the time that was freed up for me. I was sitting on my futon writing songs and I couldn’t be distracted, no matter how much ADD I have. I had just moved to a new place. I had no friends. I had nothing to do, and I just sat there and figured out my first CD, which is “The Honesty Room.” Having a broken heart made me open to a kind of what-the-hell feeling. Everything had been split open. When I wrote the song “When I Was a Boy,” I thought, Oh, maybe the feminists won’t like this because why don’t I say that I see things as a girl, or why don’t I say I was like a boy. But my heart said, No, I was a boy.



The same went for writing about a hippie babysitter and thinking nobody else had a babysitter like this. What the hell? I did, so that’s what I’ll write, and I’ll write it as accurately as I can remember in terms of how [I] felt so lucky and excited to have this magical teenager in my life. Those songs and a few others launched my career. So maybe flinging a little caution to the wind in my songwriting and saying, I don’t care if two people hear this song—[and] I’ll be one of them, helped.



IO: I was listening to you then, and hanging out with a bunch of feminists at SUNY New Paltz when those songs came out (and they liked them very much, for the record). But I remember reading somewhere that you dislike journal-entry songs. And yet, you were just saying that so many of your songs are based on personal experience. What is the difference?



DW: I have a young friend who wrote a CD recently, and the songs on it are really beautiful. They’re about leaving home. They’re about really figuring out her relationship with her parents, and dealing with the fears that she has in her life. There’s one song that she wrote about her ex-boyfriend, and she is not done with it yet. We are never done with anything, but she’s just not done with it. It doesn’t find a focus.



That’s not to say that you have to be 100 percent processed about anything. You could still have a lot of pain about it, but you kind of have to figure out what your central metaphor is going to be and where it really fits, even if it’s anger and pain, so I don’t begrudge her …that. I just feel like that’s not the song I am going to listen to on her CD. I am going to listen to the songs where she has really crystallized something.



IO: Joan Baez picked you out of the crowd earlier in your career. What was that like?



DW: It was one of those rare experiences where not only was it a dream, but I was walking around throughout the national tour we did together and every day I said, I know this is a dream. She’s invested in not cultivating any cultishness around her, so she was really clear about being a real friend, and acting as a friend, and establishing herself as a friend. She is a pretty awesome gal.



I said something political on stage once and I got totally hissed at by the audience, and [Joan] said she was proud of me. [She] was the thing that started my career. It was an incredible friendship, too. That all added up to me walking around saying, This is a dream. This is a dream and I know it’s a dream. It feels like one as I am living it.



IO: Does it still feel like a dream?



DW: My life?



IO: Yes, now.



DW: It does, actually. I keep on thinking I’ve hit the best part of my life—and then it just keeps on getting better.



IO: I’m wondering about your writing. You are obviously a prolific songwriter, and I’ve been reading your blog, which has been great. I also know that you’ve written some children’s books. Are you interested in writing any more books?



DW: I wrote what I call an eco-thriller a couple years ago, and certain people have told me that it really shouldn’t see the light of day, but other people have said that it should. It doesn’t really matter, because I had to write it. I heard that everybody should write a novel because what you learn about yourself in a year of writing that novel, you can’t get from anywhere else.

I write what I want. There are a lot of other things that I’ve written, but the songs are—this career has some roots at this point, and I’m happy to stay here for however long I can.