A funny thing happened to Dar Williams on the way to making her new album, The Green World: She came to love her success. Not at all in a manner that swelled her head, mind you, but at least to the brink of a little hard-earned giddiness. Blame it, if blame must be assigned, on the three months she spent recording the album in New York.
It was there that Williams, after nearly a decade of establishing herself as one of the leading voices in the contemporary folk scene, got her first intoxicating taste of life in the fast lane.
"It was like this whole world of musicians . . . this wonderful gritty thing," she says, still somewhat in awe. "I kind of felt like the spirit was, 'Wow, we're professional musicians, how lucky are we? Let's go out and have a really expensive dinner and drink a lot of wine.' I had so much fun, I thought, 'I'm going to move to New York and hang out with all these musicians . . . I don't want to be up in mucky, muddy New England.'"
In the end, she settled on a move to a small town two hours from the city in her native upstate New York. "I really need nature around me to balance it out," she admits. The close call inspired a song on her new album named after Greenwich Village's Spring Street, in which Williams concludes, "I don't have to go to Spring Street/Because its spring everywhere." But even though she chose the green world over the concrete jungle, her N.Y. fling helped her overcome her fear of fame and it's attendant hoopla. As a young idealist, Williams worried that any celebration of her professional achievements would lead her to the ridiculous point of insisting on "only green M&Ms" on her rider. Now, she laughs, "it's too late in the game for that kind of bullshit."
She recalls the day her last album, 1997's The End of Summer, came out. Her producer dragged her into a record store to see it on the shelves for the first time, but she wanted no part of it. She doubted it would be stocked, was pissed that it wasn't, and was doubly pissed for being pissed about the whole deal in the first place. "I thought, 'Don't get me excited about an album release, because this happens.'"
What a difference three years makes. When The Green World hit the racks a couple of weeks ago, Williams says she was "like a little girl." "I was like, 'Look at my shiny new shoes! Look at my shiny new dress! I have a new CD out!'" Walking past a New York Tower Records where she had a signing scheduled, she indulged in a moment of genuine pleasure on seeing the store's promotional display. "Every time I saw stuff like that before, I would look the other way. But now, I just thought it was so great. I was like, 'Wow, look at that frickin' famous woman with the big lettering and the huge rack of CDs!'"
Chalk it up to maturity, in an "I was so much older then/I'm younger than that now" kind of way. "As a kid, I was very unromantic -- I decided the world was too serious for me to be spacey," she say. "But as an adult, I'm really enjoying the success as it comes. I think it's so fun and groovy, and why not be excited about it?"
Success came relatively quickly to Williams. After getting her act together on the New England coffee house scene shortly after college, she paid her dues with a "tour of empty bars" in 1992, recorded her first album in 1993 and experienced her "fifteen minutes of fame" the following year at the Newport Folk Festival. "I played fifteen minutes, and my whole life changed," she says. "People showed up at shows all over the country the year after and said, 'I saw you at the Newport Folk Festival.'" Before long, folk institution Joan Baez was recording her songs and inviting her on tour. Throw in savvy management, an aggressive booking agency, the rise of AAA radio and a fan base that spread like wildfire across the Internet, and Williams readily concedes that "everything that could have gone right went right with my career."
But after the release of The End of Summer -- a turning point album that found her blurring the line between plaintive singer-songwriter fare and up-tempo rock -- Williams took stock of her career and made some adjustments. She changed management and recorded a one-off covers album, Cry Cry Cry, with fellow songwriters Lucy Kaplansky and Richard Shindell, followed by a tour. And she took an uncharacteristically long time ushering out her next album after releasing one a year for three years straight.
"If somebody said, 'What, did you just not get it together?' -- that might be true," she says. "But I think it's good. Being a girl with a guitar, you don't want to be like, 'I am this machine called Dar Williams. I put out an album in '94, '95, '96, '97, '98 . . .' It's good to have people say, 'Wow, maybe she wigged out for a little bit, and this is going to be really new.' And it is, and I kinda did."
That mindset, coupled with her refreshed outlook on success, shines through The Green World, particularly on the opening "Playing to the Firmament." It's a celebration of the joys of slowing down, letting go and enjoying blessings too often taken for granted. "You know I can't find the soul in this striving," she sings. "Why not play to a dream?/'Cause the world is too green for all this bad driving."
Still, lest she become too complacent, Williams has recently siphoned some of her creativity towards writing a screenplay, an endeavor that traces its roots back to her original ambition to be a playwright. "There's a really good chance that I'm bad at it," she admits. "But it's good to challenge yourself, to think that I could seriously fail. I feel like if I did that with music right now, if it was a huge failure, people would be like, 'She's trying something new!' Instead of, 'Wow, she's really bad at this.'"
RICHARD SKANSE
(September 8, 2000)
