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 WILLIAMSI 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.
More Dar Williams Quotes
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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
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 -
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.
DAR WILLIAMS -
I have a sordid past.
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 -
Guiding the ship takes more the your skill. It is the compass inside as the strength of your will.
DAR WILLIAMS -
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.
DAR WILLIAMS -
And you bring your words, But you’re just like them, You’re unprepared ‘Cause you don’t know the terrain
DAR WILLIAMS -
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 WILLIAMS -
What was nice about the nineties is that it was an example of music that responded to a desire of the times. It spoke to the social conditions of the times.
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 -
God looks like a guidance counselor, God’s got that smile. God says, ‘How could this be? That’s really odd I guess I’ll have to check my records, silly me, you know, I’m only God.’
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 -
Milwaukee one of my favorite cites; I think Milwaukee is #1.
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