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 WILLIAMSWhat 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.
More Dar Williams Quotes
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There’s tons of anger and angst and peculiarity and eccentricity, and good towns know that that’s okay. But towns that are kind of bullshit don’t know what to do with all those feelings.
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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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We have evolved to understand that language of power that’s taken too much.
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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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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.
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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
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If you’re lucky you find something that reflects you, Helps you feel your life, protects you, Cradles you and connects you to everything.
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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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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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They preach that I should save the world. They pray that I won’t do a better job of it.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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Guiding the ship takes more the your skill. It is the compass inside as the strength of your will.
DAR WILLIAMS