Dar Williams

There is not a trace of bitterness in the stories Dar Williams tells about the sometimes rocky road to her present gig as crown princess of American contemporary folk music.\n"Nobody liked me when I was 12," Williams says. "I remember babysitting for a kid, and his dog was mean to me! And the kid was mean to me, and I was like, 'Oh my God, children and dogs don't even like me!'"\nWilliams will follow that road to Bloomington for a concert Tuesday at the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre. Her journey -- she is coming up on her 35th birthday -- began with a childhood in Chappaqua, N.Y., an upscale suburb north of New York City.\n"I think maybe I was very kind in high school, but very mean in elementary school. Kids were just horrific to me when I was 12 and 13," Williams says, laughing. "And I remember when I was young, two of them said, 'I'm being mean to you because you were so incredibly mean to me.' It was very hard because -- talk about kick a girl when she's down -- at 12 or 13 you're basically in a big pool of molten lava. Who knows what form you're going to come out as." \nAlthough Williams can confidently and willingly deconstruct the evolution of that form in her music and writing, it is the subject of those liminal moments of her youth that seems to awaken her enthusiasm. \nShe chuckles at the fact that her graduating class at Horace Greeley High School narrowly voted her "most talented," and then took her by surprise by voting her second place for "straightest arrow." \n"I have a dimple. I have blue eyes. I guess that's how I must've been perceived," Williams says, although the clear affection she expresses for the risk-takers and outsiders she looked up to back then makes it difficult to imagine her as anything but one of the cool kids.\nAre you out there?\nBy opening her latest CD, Out There Live, with "As Cool As I Am," Williams implicitly acknowledges her status as a poster child for coolness. Yet her own use of the word veers away from the self-conscious living wardrobe of adolescent cool so often typified by aloofness or angst. \nWilliams' heroes are the trailblazers who are faithful to human rights and environmental causes as an example. \n"The ones who were into the sound of their own voices are now lawyers for oil corporations, but the ones who retreated into the hills to actually start something, like an organic broccoli farm, they're still cool. They think a lot about other people," she says. "I think people who can have radical beliefs and still live in a community with other people are cool to me, and the eccentrics in my town always seemed great to me."\nWilliams easily localizes her point. "I met a lesbian couple who live in Indiana, outside of Indianapolis, and they run a retreat center, and across the street there's a guy who baptizes people in his pool. They live amicably. They say, 'Well he does what he does, so we do what we do.'"\nWilliams also looks back fondly on adults in the community she grew up in who occasionally broke with protocol to communicate with unusual or refreshing honesty.\n"I remember a friend's mother who was probably just kind of narcissistic and didn't notice that we were kids, but she would tell us things about her sex life, and I thought that was cool," Williams remembers.\n"I also liked it when another friend's father, on the sly one afternoon as I happened to be sitting with him, turned and said, 'I don't understand Modern Art. I really just don't get it.'" \nHer friends\n"There is a culture of kindness around Dar Williams," says Gail Cohen, founder and administrator of www.darwilliams.net, the central online resource for Williams' fans.\n"Kindness gives it a nice daily ring," Williams says, noting that global labels such as "compassion" and "interdependence" don't capture the same spirit.\n"I think the thing I'm most grateful for is that I at some point -- and it might have been in high school -- I got it. I just got it, about what it is to be alive. That hoarding and everything doesn't work." \nSo what happened to the 12-year-old with the kids-and-dogs problem?\n"A couple of kids whose true hearts shone reached out to me for no good reason. These people came through for me in a really genuine way, and I 'got it' that being meaner was not going to be a way to address this, and that I had to kind of surrender. So I just surrendered early, and it works, you know?"\nWhat do you hear in these sounds?\nWilliams speaks confidently and incisively about the healing process associated with personal growth, and describes it as obtaining a widened sense of roles, and a widened sense of what's permissible and achievable. \n"My eyes were opened to the fact that there are so many ways to be, and so many ways to be happy and to get it right."\nShe describes a key moment of realization that occurred as a result of an especially nasty bout with depression during her senior year in college. Her sister stepped in having recognized the symptoms, and helped her to seek help. \n"I guess that became a pretty central theme of my writing: How people either find a daily experience or one life-changing experience to pull themselves out of the rut of a strong faith in their inabilities," Williams says.\nCohen points out that Williams' music is somewhat therapeutic for her fans, but in an open sort of way.\n"She doesn't preach to you," Cohen says. "Even when she is talking about the depths of despair there's always sort of a sense of hope with what she's saying."\nAnd she's so kind, I think she wants to tell me something,\nBut she knows that it's much better if I get it for myself.\n-- from the song "What Do You Hear in These Sounds"\nWilliams knows that there is sometimes an ambiguity to her lyrics that leaves room for the listener to personalize a song.\n"Early on I realized that if you write something that can have five interpretations, but all five of them really work, there's no harm in that," she says.\nBut Williams also notes that it's unmistakable when she has stumbled into saying things in a way that strikes a special chord in a more universal way. \n"There are some songs that I have written, like the song 'When I was a Boy,' that I thought wouldn't go over very well because nobody had really said it the same way before," she recalls. "I remember the first night I played it there was this sustained applause with no cheering, and it was great. I could tell something was a little different."\nCohen specifically remembers the first time she heard that song, because it was the first song she ever heard by Williams. \n"It was jaw-dropping," she says. "It was just this kind of overwhelming feeling of being home. Like this is where I really belong."\nIt looks like plenty of jaws might be dropping in Bloomington on Tuesday night. Buskirk-Chumley Theatre Director Danielle McClelland says the number of telephone inquiries about the show has been especially high.\n"We are very excited about this show," McClelland says.\nThe great unknown\nWilliams has begun the process of recording her next CD and acknowledges that she is seeing themes emerge.\n"In this one the themes are more intimate and more conversational," she says. "The songs are a little shorter, and while The Green World was about a lot of different types of religions and people falling from and rising to grace and cosmic special red-letter days, this is very different. This is actually about non-red-letter days, and the beauty of them."\nWilliams has a busy spring planned filled with red-letter days of the landmark variety. In addition to the celebration of her 35th birthday on April 19, she will be getting married to her fiancé next month. As to expanding her new family in the future to include children, she warmly enthuses, "Oh, I'd love to have kids," then quickly adds a scenario that harmonizes the idea with her career.\n"My hope would be that I would get pregnant at just that moment that I came out with an album that completely bombs. It's not worth publicizing. It's not really worth touring. It didn't do well. People hate it. That's when you go sneak off and have a baby."\nIt looks like the "sneaking off" might have to wait a little while longer.\n"I don't mean to toot my own horn, but I don't think this is that album," she says.\nIf these words had come from the mouth of any other pop star, the horn-tooting police would already be on the way to make an arrest. From Williams, they sound more like another kind secret revealed on the sly. By now dogs and kids would have to agree that Williams is one cool folksinger.