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 WILLIAMSEveryone has to decide how they’re going to appear in their lives, how they’re going to put themselves out there to the world.
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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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.
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Women were making more money. Women were saying, “My voice counts. If we’re going out on a Friday night, I don’t want to see a Rambo movie. I want to go see a singer/songwriter who sings about my life”.
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At this point, I feel like I have roots in a lot of places. I have friends who have put down roots, in Seattle and San Francisco and Portland, and I feel very close to them.
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For 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.
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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.
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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.
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When we learn about ourselves, we can evolve.
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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.
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And I’ll act like I have faith, and like that faith never ends, but I really just have friends.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The best, most solid place to stand as you look at our present situation is on a foundation of history. The Roman Empire, the British Empire, and the Nazi empire all have things in common.
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There’s always people who came 600 miles to hear the song you didn’t play.
DAR WILLIAMS