Dar Williams Climbs Mt. Olympus

And every day in April I looked for that album. And every day in May I looked for that album. And then in June I recorded an album and was finishing it up in July. That was my first album, The Honesty Room, and the first track on it was “When I Was A Boy.” Then in August I got a phone call from somebody who said, “Did you know the Jane Siberry album has come out?”

And I said, “How did you know I was looking for this Jane Siberry record? I’ve been looking for it every day since April.” He said, “I didn’t know, but it’s called When I Was A Boy.

I think that’s because in the ’90s we were all looking at gender. What’s a girl? What’s a boy? How do you define yourself? What counts, what matters, who do you sleep with? It was a very playful time, so I think people were just thinking that way.

Now, we have tsunamis, earthquakes and stock markets that cut themselves in half in a day, massive epic failures. Even Rick Santorum seems like something out of fiction to me.

So I think a lot of people are thinking about Greek mythology. I think that people are sort of saying this comes from an epic, ancient set of characters that are of, what we call ‘civilization’ for better or for worse. As opposed to saying Armageddon is coming or the end is near or we’ve sinned or have done terrible things. Great things are happening to terrible bankers and terrible things to very honest farmers. That’s just not fitting right now.

You’ve covered a lot of ground in your travels. Is there anything you take with you from the places you visit?

I take a very strong impression with me. Part of what the town is comes across in the restaurants, the cafes, the streets. It’s not in the hotels but in the environment around the venues and in the audiences. I think in your early 20s you’re not supposed to have a firm opinion about something. You’re supposed to keep your mind open. Yet you have strong opinions despite that. In my 40s it’s kind of the opposite. I’m more than willing to open my mind to things. But I do have a very strong sense of what the future needs to look like in this country, where our strength really is. If you have enough community strength to put on an all-volunteer music series with really eclectic stuff, you have this actual human conduit that helps everybody be more global citizens, that’s the best of civilization. It doesn’t have a corporate sponsor and it very much reflects and builds these really interesting connections that are bipartisan, multigenerational and creative. That’s the thing I draw from the proximity.

I kept looking at one thing, like a town’s relationship to music, to parks, to beauty, to food, education. Actually, where you have strength in one thing, you generally tend to see that strength growing in other things every time you go back.

Not only have I covered a lot of ground, I covered a lot of ground on an annual basis. Denver has a lot of interesting green space and really nice little neighborhoods. One neighborhood has been building its café culture and it’s next to a river that has a pedestrian and bike path on either side. You’d see people walking and talking, you’d see flowers growing. My bet is the next time I go there, there will be a hydration station for your water bottle as opposed to people selling water bottles. And I’ll bet somebody is going to start growing beans and I’ll bet there will be more flowers the next time I’m there. Then I’m going to start to see drop-in Yoga classes and free art classes for kids, maybe some interesting impromptu galleries at cafés that allow local artists to show their stuff.

There are places where I see something take hold and, dollars to donuts, it’s grown the next year. I consider that to be such a great strength to witness, such a cool thing. [It’s] something I always point to when people speak despairingly about this country. I say I see the good growing in certain ways and certain places. And people say, “Yeah, college towns.’ And I say, “No, it’s not that,” because Rockland, Maine, doesn’t have a college. And, frankly, there are college towns that don’t have the formula down at all.

Sometimes it’s the opposite. No one would say New Haven has prospered from Yale’s presence. And Stanford [University] is in Palo Alto, which is a very wealthy town, so you have this opportunity to cross-pollinate. But I think its so competitive and fast-moving that I don’t see something growing.

Whereas in Phoenixville, Pa., when I went there, they had just renovated this theater, they were struggling, they were sort of getting grants and doing things to get going. When I went back there, the café I liked was even groovier. They had something called “Blobfest” because ”The Blob” was partially filmed in the theatre. Every year they have a screening of “The Blob” and it’s a big celebration. Because it’s called Phoenixville, at another time of the year they burn a phoenix made out of wood. They build this beautiful phoenix and then they burn it. It’s so popular that it’s kind of a hazard – fire, parking and stuff.

But I’m watching this town getting greener and groovier. People want to congregate, people want to stay, they want to walk and talk. Did it start with the theatre? That might be part of it. Or did the theatre come out of the way people were starting to walk and talk with each other and the conversations that said, “What about that abandoned old theatre Shouldn’t we do something with it? It’s probably so beautiful on the inside.”

Is every journey a reaffirmation of your hopes?

I’ll say this, I’ve never seen it go in the opposite direction. I’ve never seen a town that’s starting to get a foothold in non-motorized transportation, greening, farm-to-tables … I’ve never seen it slip backwards into less of that. I’ve seen it branching out into more age groups, income groups and creative expressions.

Shawn Colvin and Larry Campbell appear on your new album. Haven’t you worked with both artists before?

Larry had been all over a couple of my albums and I’ve known him ever since. He’s a lovely person. Everybody who knows him loves him. And then he’s got this talent on top of that. So that’s Larry. Shawn I know from touring together.

When artists spend some social time together, is there a lot of name-dropping or talk of “Bob” or “Pete’ or “Levon?” Or is it all kind of subdued?

It’s both. It’s a lot of subdued name-dropping because these are the people you work with. If you were a chef, you would want to talk about the extra-fancy swordfish you wild-caught in the ocean. These people are very interesting and eccentric. So you end up talking about them but it’s always in the spirit of camaraderie and how we’re all getting there.

One of my friends has this great story about gently counseling a big rock star to drink water during the shows and only drink alcohol before and after the show and that maybe he wouldn’t have to throw up on stage so often if he’d follow that simple rule. And we had all sorts of talks about where that artist had discreetly vomited during his set.

So if you have a choice between talking about that and talking about the latest book you’ve read, somehow, as colorful and weird as they are, they are more vivid shades of the colors we know. The follow-up is that this guy still barfs, although at one point he was only drinking water. It turned out they were in this arena in Spain and everybody lifted their hands to clap … and he still lost it.

I hear stories like that all the time and they just crack me up. I just heard about a big record company story where this guy had this massive collection of liqueurs from all over the world and in one night the guests drank all of it. They’d point to orange and say, “There’s orange in my flag, so I’m going to drink that whole orange liqueur.” A great international, crazy blowout. So there’s a lot of name-dropping and a lot of information about people you know.

Dar Williams launches her spring tour in Santa Barbara, Calif., at the Soho Restaurant & Music Club April 17. During her first week on the road she will play Los Angeles at Largo April 18; Berkeley, Calif., at Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse April 19; Portland, Ore., at Aladdin Theater April 20 and Seattle’s Triple Door April 21. Upcoming stops also include St. Louis, Minneapolis, New York City, Savannah and Cincinnati.