I came out of that and said I don’t want to go back to feeling depressed. So I asked myself, what can I be optimistic about, in terms of the course of the planet? And I discovered there was no end to the optimism I felt.
DAR WILLIAMSChoices you made about how you recorded and what instruments you used and how much real versus how much synthetic. Those were choices that were seen as very political at the time.
More Dar Williams Quotes
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I remember doing “As Cool As I Am” and Steve Miller, the producer, saying “I really hear a drum loop here. I want to play it for you.”
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I am happy to do political fundraisers. I always hope that my friends will be, too. It’s part of who you are and you shouldn’t feel ashamed of what you believe in.
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It’s a collective truth that slavery is wrong, that child labor is wrong, that gross inequality is wrong. God didn’t send it.
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Now that I believe in God, I have an extra layer of saying I’ll write about what I write about and assume that I’m being offered the opportunity to illuminate something important. But when you think you are too important, you become some sort of fascist.
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The pendulum usually swings from left to right and then right to left, but there are so many people in power who have taken the pendulum and just pinned it to the right that there is a fear that it’s never going to swing back.
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A lot of the songs are pretty unmasked. If you listen to “As Cool As I Am,” it’s not all that different from what you were hearing from Ani DiFranco and some of the other indie women artists of the time. It was still in that context, still seen as folk music.
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Guiding the ship takes more the your skill. It is the compass inside as the strength of your will.
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And where does magic come from? I think that magic’s in the learning.
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I really value people besides parents who nurture kids.
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I would push for more production and Steve Miller would say, “Why do you want to have more production when you have real songs? You don’t want to cover up the song.”
DAR WILLIAMS -
One of them looked at me and shook her head, like “Don’t do that.” I think she was doing it to say, “It doesn’t work.” She didn’t say anything but it was this cautionary moment. I knew it didn’t work. There are just so many other words to choose from.
DAR WILLIAMS -
I am one of those sort of “lesser” types, those sensitive types, those people who wouldn’t have made it on their own if other people hadn’t helped them.
DAR WILLIAMS -
A straightforward capitalist society would’ve cut them off and let them die. So I was saved by my friends and by my family and by people who cared about me, and by modern psychotherapy that cared about women.
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The summer ends and we wonder who we are And there you go, my friends, with your boxes in your car And today I passed the high school, the river, the maple tree I passed the farms that made it
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Everyone has to decide how they’re going to appear in their lives, how they’re going to put themselves out there to the world.
DAR WILLIAMS







