You fly all over the country opening for these other people. You pay a publicist to get some press while you’re establishing yourself and you will be solvent in this career forevermore.
DAR WILLIAMSFor my 50th birthday I just want to make it all make sense [being exactly half introvert], and then a couple of weeks later do the blow-out with all my friends.
More Dar Williams Quotes
-
-
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 -
If you’re looking for can-do, earthy-crunchy attitude then you’ve got to go to Wisconsin.
DAR WILLIAMS -
I’ve watched towns and cities evolve and become very resilient, and fun, and unique, and prosperous on their own terms. And the secret is bridging. It’s when the local church has a fun clothing swap fundraiser with a temple, and then the next year they bring in the mosque.
DAR WILLIAMS -
When we learn about ourselves, we can evolve.
DAR WILLIAMS -
Milwaukee one of my favorite cites; I think Milwaukee is #1.
DAR WILLIAMS -
I’m just trying to be part of the movement that decentralizes and hopefully creates peace. By supporting smaller, democratic structures, you can effect change.
DAR WILLIAMS -
Guiding the ship takes more the your skill. It is the compass inside as the strength of your will.
DAR WILLIAMS -
We all do the wrong thing. And then we have to wake up the next morning and live with the fact that we have done things that are wrong.
DAR WILLIAMS -
What happened on “As Cool As I Am” was, you know how in the ’90s, “the personal is political, the political is personal”? That was a really big thing.
DAR WILLIAMS -
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.
DAR WILLIAMS -
Every time you opt in to kindness Make one connection, used to divide us It echoes all over the world
DAR WILLIAMS -
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.”
DAR WILLIAMS -
I have odometer readings, kids; all sorts of measurements of what I’ve been doing for the last 20 years. I get it. I get that it was a while ago.
DAR WILLIAMS -
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.
DAR WILLIAMS -
I really lucked out with that song [“As Cool As I Am”]. Men were becoming much more comfortable with all the different facets and parts of their identity, including their gentler, funnier, sillier, nurturing parts. They started showing up.
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.
DAR WILLIAMS -
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.
DAR WILLIAMS -
I would encourage people to bridge broadly and creatively in their communities, not just because that creates the most fun and resiliency, but also because it creates the most points of access for people to be part of the community, which is what democracy is at its best.
DAR WILLIAMS -
Choices 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.
DAR WILLIAMS -
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 WILLIAMS -
It’s a collective truth that slavery is wrong, that child labor is wrong, that gross inequality is wrong. God didn’t send it.
DAR WILLIAMS -
Through the last days of the century And I knew that I was going to learn again Again, in this less hazy light I saw the fields beyond the fields The fields beyond the field
DAR WILLIAMS -
We have evolved to understand that language of power that’s taken too much.
DAR WILLIAMS -
There was one tour where I thought, “If I can’t get this feeling back of being excited to be on the stage, then I will quit.” Because I have friends who have dialed it in and I watch their concerts and shake my head. I’m sure the audience can tell, too.
DAR WILLIAMS -
Every once in a while I’ll say something…I dropped the F-bomb early on in my career. There was this lesbian couple and they looked super-hip.
DAR WILLIAMS -
Things are important to you and then they recede within a day. That’s the only thing that keeps me from believing that there’s going to be any one organic big wave; although the Americana (music) thing has been happening for a while.
DAR WILLIAMS