Dar Williams quotes:

But if you're looking to be spooked by really tall trees then you've got to go to Washington State.

If you're looking for can-do, earthy-crunchy attitude then you've got to go to Wisconsin.

Being told that you are good at banter is like being told that you are a good person.

Sometimes I see myself fine, sometimes I need a witness. And I like the whole truth, but there are nights I only need forgiveness.

I'm becoming a professional nomad and enjoying that whole part of my life.

How I long to fall just a little bit, to dance out of the lines and stray from the light.

Milwaukee one of my favorite cites; I think Milwaukee is #1.

Sometimes life gives us lessons sent in ridiculous packaging.

I really value people besides parents who nurture kids.

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.'

In the laughing times we know that we are lucky, and in the quiet times we know that we are blessed. And we will not be alone.

Arizona is really cool but I couldn't stay there for too long.

The very best thing you can do is to try to write a song that has some sort of impact.

I watch people throw aluminum cans in the trash, and I think of all the stories I've heard about the over-mining of aluminum, the erosion that happens, and the trees that fall down.

And if I had a camera Showing all the light we give And showing where the light extends I'd give it to my friends

Writing 'February' made me realize that breaking form is a way of letting the song be human.

Go ahead, push your luck, find out how much love the world can hold.

Every time you opt in to kindness Make one connection, used to divide us It echoes all over the world

The funny thing is musicians often love to go to see visual art because you've got all these pictures to turn into metaphors.

But social justice and the environment are very tied together in my head.

I think music is another language.

"Is it how she moves, or how she looks?" I say it's loneliness suspended to our own like grappling hooks, And as long as she's got noise, she's fine. But I could teach her how I learned to dance when the music's ended.

I have a sordid past.

I was raised by parents who really admired the religious leaders of the left, as many 60s and 70s liberals did.

Basically, I have found that people who have tried to start communities out of good feelings or hippie-dippie abstract concepts of love - it doesn't work. But if you just concentrate on what is the identity of your town - its waterfalls, its battles, its notable mill strike or those things - you dig into what your town is from its rock formations to its history to its food. Then this thing called community happens all the time.

And where does magic come from? I think that magic's in the learning.

There's a marketing scheme that tells you that pregnancy and child rearing will make you into a moron, that your kids are only happy when you're buying them stuff. It's hard being a parent, but I laugh a lot and smile a lot and really enjoy it. The ratio of laughter to sadness is higher. There's part of me that wants to broadcast that. Parenting only affirmed what I already cared about, and that's good

If a war has to happen, a war has to happen.

The kind of organic wave, the way that waves move, and I'm not just talking about feminism, the way that a social movement might rise like a wave. It's harder to build any kind of wave now. 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.

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. 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."

Everyone has to decide how they're going to appear in their lives, how they're going to put themselves out there to the world.

Slavery doesn't have any positives.

When we learn about ourselves, we can evolve.

And the ones that know you so well are the ones that can swallow you whole.

I try to be careful not to do single concerts where I fly out, do my show, turn around and go home.

There's always people who came 600 miles to hear the song you didn't play.

Guiding the ship takes more the your skill. It is the compass inside as the strength of your will.

The first concert I saw was Cheryl Wheeler.

The biggest difference would be made if we don't have wars to begin with.

...we're all in a soup of trying to live by words, and trying to live by poetry. It's both humbling, and really flattering to know that my words are part of all that.

I just think the reassurance and the steadiness and the hands-on kindness can make a huge difference.

Sixties folk rock was my original muse and the folk audience-people who listen to music off the beaten track-fostered my career. I definitely don't want to abandon the genre but I also need to make sure I'm Dar Williams first.

Youll almost encounter a superstition amongst musicians, people sort of go through strange rituals, what they need to do to write a song.

We have evolved to understand that language of power that's taken too much.

But I benefit from the taxes I pay because I know how to access the benefits of the taxes.

They preach that I should save the world. They pray that I won't do a better job of it.

[Mortal City ] was also the beginning of the reality of the fact that I was going to have little pieces of my personality identifying with all of these different parts of the country.

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 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

And I'll act like I have faith, and like that faith never ends, but I really just have friends.

But where do we come up with this notion of a woman in which the less space you take up, the more you're worth?

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.

The only word for love is everybody's name.

Therapy was the biggest romance of my life.

And you bring your words, But you're just like them, You're unprepared 'Cause you don't know the terrain

All the things you treasure most will be the hardest won I will watch you struggle long before the answers come But I won't make it harder, I'll be there to cheer you on I'll shine the light that guides you down the road you're walking on

A song versus an album is not like a scene versus a play.

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.

The light that stopped the night felt like forgiveness.

I fear that to fall in love with you is to fall from a great and gruesome height.

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.

There's the wind And the rain And the mercy of the fallen Who say, "Hey, it's not my place To know what's right" There's the weak And the strong And the many stars that guide us We have some of them inside us

If you're lucky you find something that reflects you, Helps you feel your life, protects you, Cradles you and connects you to everything.

There was a lot of distance between the Dar of The Honesty Room and the Dar of Mortal City, so there was no attempt.

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. 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.

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." When I wrote it, I thought, "This isn't going to sound very folky. I don't think it's going to go with mandolins and banjos." Then he played the loop for me and it sounded right.

The rest of the songs on the album [Mortal City ] have spare arrangements on them. Steve [Miller], really loved that. He'd just come off of a project with someone who basically had to mask the fact that there were no songs there with production. He said, "Oh, my God, you have real songs here!"

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."

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.

I went from having three little jobs that I strung together to being on the road full-time; having some savings that my managers told me to spend. 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.

I spent a year pulling all-nighters and driving around in a really tiny fuel-efficient car relying on the kindness of strangers and seeing this incredible range of landscapes throughout the United States. That's what happened with The Honesty Room. It was a huge night and day switch.

I started going out with one of my managers and he really grew me up in a lot of ways. He introduced me not just to being a full-time traveler, which I was, but he was also really very interested in history and art and continued to open my eyes up to regional history; less splashy histories. He was interested in historical societies and stuff like that. He introduced me to a way of looking at the way communities form that is the foundation for the book that I've just finished writing that has to do with what I see as effective community-building wherever I've been traveling.

As I said in one of my songs, we're still abolishing slavery, but nobody says it's a good thing. Nobody justifies it.

It's a collective truth that slavery is wrong, that child labor is wrong, that gross inequality is wrong. God didn't send it.

I think we're coming to a place where we're saying all war is wrong. We might even learn something about the sensationalism we get caught up in with people like Donald Trump.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A lot of men were also becoming more attuned and less afraid of women [in the nineties ].

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. There was so much exploration of gender at that time. Women were showing up with the range of ways of being female in the world and men were showing up with the range of being male in the world.

I think the music was speaking to that opening up of whose voice gets heard and how multidimensional that voice can be.

There was this moment in 2003 when I was asked to do a fundraiser for someone who was speaking out against the Iraq war when nobody was. I said, "I will do a fundraiser for that guy." And then my friend John Hall, from the band Orleans...He ran for Congress in my district and won. I did a bunch of fundraisers for him.

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.

It's just that you don't have to bring it to every stage. You can do a fundraiser for people that you support. You don't necessarily have to talk about one thing or another when you're on your own.

Just like my career, I've sung the same songs night after night in so many ways. It's always different because every space is different. I lost my mojo once. It was like Austin Powers. I don't know why or how, but I had to get it back. And I did.

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.

I went to Canada and played in this tiny bar where the windows were steaming up and everybody was so animated and singing along right there at the foot of the stage, looking up, and I got my mojo back .

Mortal City was really influenced by geography. [The song] "The Ocean" is the Pacific Northwest. Southern California and New York also figure into songs, and Iowa. "February" is very much about New England. "Mortal City" is Philadelphia. The whole album is this anthropomorphized landscape where the metaphors live in this geography.

The only I would say is a little different is when I know my parents are in the audience. That's never going to be the same as another concert.

There are a lot of people out there who are exactly half extrovert and half introvert and they love to be extroverts as long as they have enough time to go off and figure it all out.

You know how people say they're either like a cat or a dog? I feel like a cat. I just want to be alone. Isn't that weird? It's a lot to take in.

When people in government [make mistakes], they don't say, those people in the government. They say, we've got a problem to solve.

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. 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.