|
|
Dar Williams and Hummingbird Highway |
|
In collaboration with producer Ken Rich (who also was the sound engineer
and mixer), Dar Williams and her accompanying musicians have created an
exquisite collection of songs for her album Hummingbird Highway
with a release date of September 12 (2025). It does not take long to
realize, while speaking with Dar Williams that you are engaging with a
thoughtful, deep thinking, beautifully creative and highly intelligent
individual, who cares passionately about the world in which she lives.
At the midpoint of the record, there is a brief tonal shift that caught
this writer by surprise. David Chalfant co-produced “Put the Coins,” and
“What Bird Did You See?” at Grand Street Recording and Norfolk Studios
at Northampton, Massachusetts.
We open our conversation with Dar Williams inviting her to talk about
one of the prettiest songs you will hear in 2025, “Tu Sais Le
Printemps.”
“The best way to
go about writing a song and if you feel something coming on, is to do
your best to feel curious about it. This seemed light, breezy, spring
like and romantic. I thought well let’s just keep on going. I pulled out
(she laughs lightly) all the pictures of France, pictures of spring, of
gardens and bridges and then I looked at them to see where the story
(was going). My favorite part is the dog standing outside of the
restaurant (she chuckles
–
referring to the music video).
It is a French bulldog and then the aerial views of France and the
cherry blossoms. The song is left open and evocative for people. You
can’t help to find your way back to love or to love in that kind of
setting.
I had this interesting melody that kept on being the best setting for a
return to romance, as aided by the spring. When I wrote the line, “And
of maddening times, we will laugh and say that’s how it goes…,”
I actually had a really emotional understanding of how much of my
heartaches I had let go and they had transformed into humor and
friendships in my own life. There is kind of a lightness to letting go
of all of that,” she explains.
Throughout this
album, it appears that Dar Williams enjoys weaving stories, but rather
than perhaps forming a misguided opinion, we posed that very question to
her.
“Yeah, I think that is probably the best description. I was a theater
major in college. I am interested in the kinds of stories you can tell
with music and that you would tell differently on stage or you would
tell differently in a movie.
What I love in listening to music and writing music is how much
storytelling you can do with the music itself including silence in a
song. I have been very interested in finding words with little
variations that let me tell the story. I came to that as something of a
novice, with a decent ear and a love of harmony, back when I was
twenty-one,” she says.
What do you get when you combine an ocean cruise, with Thomas Hardy’s
books that one is listening to, while creating a stone path, as the
first step in turning your lawn into a meadow?
Well, the answer is the Dar Williams song, “All Is Come Undone.”
I just had the melody of the chorus and it started in my head in 2020
and I remember because I was on a cruise. I was listening to Thomas
Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd and Bathsheba Everdene is the
protagonist, the Lady of the Manor. Yet she is very much the fabric of
her community (Weatherbury). She needs them. She needs their friendship.
She needs their trust.
I combined her story with this phenomenon of what really happens when
you think you have your head together, but then this letter comes and
all that you see is the handwriting or just a bit of the return address.
You just know it’s that person. Things fall apart when you hear about
them on the sidewalk or through their handwriting. She’s kind of the ego
and then she has this guardian (Gabriel Oak) who (helps manage) the
estate.
She is kind of the id and then you have the town that is sort of the ego
that pulls her back. She lost her shit and that happens. She’s our
daughter, she’s our people, so we will bring her back. (Gabriel Oak) is
like an unimaginative super ego and the town is the ego that says no,
let’s just harmonize this. Let’s bring her back. This happened.
In the end there is this harvest feast that she invites everybody to in
a very Thomas Hardy way. In my mind one of the things that helps to
galvanize community and let’s us know our identities are the seasons
that we (go through) and we have to abide by their rules. We harvest
with the full moon and we can hunt during the evening of the full moon.
We have to listen to these seasons (she starts to laugh) or we
will starve otherwise. Celebrations in our community are centered around
sowing, reaping, the harvest and the communities that make it through
the winter. It is very reassuring. In the end she (Bathsheba) invites
them to this harvest feast. It shows how the seasons, the farms, the
people, the shop (keepers), everything sort of holds her identity, so
that when she really loses it, she can be folded back in. They love her
and that is what a community can do.
I was thinking of elements of the mind and how seasons hold those in
place and I was thinking of Thomas Hardy, while I was making my little
stone path and I was
deciding where the phlox and the Black-Eyed Susans were going to go,”
says Dar Williams.
Another thing that strikes you about the songs that Dar Williams writes
is that she does not appear to be interested in wowing people, but
rather for the most part her songs seem to meet people where they are,
with their feelings, talking about the types of things that we all go
through in our lives at one time or another, the good, the bad and the
stuff in between, the challenging and the easier time in our lives.
She picks up on that thought, “Yeah. Everybody loves it when they find a
good hook. I can be as completely enamored with a beautiful melody as
anyone in other people’s music or when I feel I have stumbled upon one.
I will do everything that I can do to keep the thing that I feel is
beautiful and interesting, for me, because I am the audience. I
encourage writers to keep actual colors in their songs, to help keep
them colorful and to find interesting words that are variations on what
we may have heard before to keep everything awake.
I like that stuff, but I follow my own life. I joke the science of
songwriting is what is pretty and what is interesting. You just follow
those two things. Some of the people with whom I have the most long
running connections are the people whose lives have followed mine within
about a ten-year period. In terms of high school angst, college angst
(she chuckles) parent angst or the things that come up at these
milestones.
They say it has been a nice parallel, because I take the time to
crystalize and to find the words that sum up and elevate the experience
to a perch where we can look at it and understand what it means. As they
say to me, it’s like we all have grown up together.
I wrote songs that I felt were for me or for maybe a really small
sub-culture. Those turned out to be the most popular, so I had no
choice. I was thinking I was doing something upbeat and that would be
the radio single. They were the radio single, but they disappeared
pretty fast. The life experience ones were constantly the ones that
endured.”
Dar where are you on your personal journey?
“I am excited to be putting out this album. I feel like I have really
come to understand that if you have an impulse to do something creative,
just do it. I do have to do more to make sure I sit myself down to
experiment.
I remember one time going on an excursion with my friend and as I
stepped over the threshold of my house the first lines of “After All,”
came into my head and I wrote it twenty-five years ago. It just came to
me. I quickly went to it and sat with my guitar and I kept on fleshing
it out. None of my songs get written overnight.
I am (as a writer) more going to a museum and opening up my mind or
sitting down with my guitar and playing some chords and seeing how they
sync with things that I am feeling. I am more diligent than I think I
used to be.
I am writing a
teen novel and I have been coming up with an idea for a horror story
(she laughs lightly), a horror novel and writing songs. Do you know the
expression cozy mystery. They are these mysteries that happen in these
cozy little thatched roof houses in England. All you see is the vicar’s
feet coming out of the bedroom, but otherwise no blood and gore. One of
them (books) is about a Rock star who is scandalized and another is
about a haunted berry field (she laughs some more). [Editor’s note:
We can tell you as those novels are ready for publication, Dar Williams
has already said she would like us to interview her about them.]
Interestingly enough, even though several members of her family are
immersed in history either professionally or personally, she counts
herself as being the one whose attention to history is the least, and
yet her song “Olive Tree,” caused this writer to ask, prior to our
conversation, did this really happen? Did that take place? The answers
were always yes in the research that we did and during the conversation
that ensued.
“I am really interested in interesting stories present, past, fiction,
cozy mysteries or historical mysteries. I love listening to audio books
by Robert Harris. I highly recommend An Officer and a Spy. It is
about the Dreyfus affair and it is beautifully done. It is just riveting
(Editor’s note: We like that word!). I love that stuff. I love listening
to the Churchill biography. Like any American, even before Black Lives
Matter, it is really important to look at other histories, whether they
are recent or four hundred years ago. That’s a thing I just do. You just
have to read them.
It (the song
Olive Tree)
just started with under an olive tree, under an olive tree. What
I did in my mind is I set out a big table and with every olive
association on it. Once upon a time after college, I went to Europe. It
was really a great thing. I was cheap, as I stayed in youth hostels and
I ate lots of cheap things. One day I missed the bus from outside of the
city, so I walked ten miles through olive groves. I must have had a
guardian angel, because I was completely safe and I was completely
alone.
Encountering the world alone when you are twenty-two it really gets in
there. (more laughter) I had this sense that they are so beautiful and
gnarled (the trees, not the people!). They take care of themselves and
they take care of us. I would always see it as a symbol of civilization
like our attempts to be in a civilized society.
That was going through my mind and I was going through this whole thing
when my husband and I were trying to decide if olive oil was politically
correct. We had heard that it is the currency of organized crime. That
it is the (way) organized crime money is laundered. We read some article
and then we read about Greek olive oil and American olive oil. I found
this thing called the Berkeley olive oil. I called this woman and she
was so excited about it she told me the whole story. She and her husband
ran the Berkeley Olive Grove. At the end of the story, she said, and get
this, my name is Olivia (Dar Williams laughs). She told it from the
perspective of the dream. I think these guys (who originally planted the
trees) kind of knew this grove was an investment. They would lease out
the olive grove and maybe it was their retirement. If they did it for
that reason they succeeded.
They found a Greek olive tree they knew would grow in the United States.
I think they must have felt the connection between the ancient country
and this new country. The ideals of the olive tree and the ideals of
this new nation, especially in 1913 at the cusp of the progressive era.
I had to understand these guys and their symbolism,” she says.
At this point we interject and ask about the references in the song to
Socrates, Platon and Aristotle.
“Sometimes when we talk about, how we are teetering on a fascist
dictatorship, authoritarian rule, it is important to remember that could
have been the whole story. This is really broad stroked. I sent it to my
dad and I said please be forgiving here, I smudged a lot of history
together. The apocryphal history is Plato started doing these lectures
and people would come up and they planted olive trees around it. You
would go into the halls where they had lectures and they would talk
about them with each other. This was following a lot of autocratic
leaders, but they said let’s lighten it up and be an enlightened
society. Aristotle apparently left the halls and went out on a journey.
He would encounter people and he found a way to reason and bring out
what the answers could be and built upon these answers through
inquiries. He did that by
going out into the fields.
People were brought in from all over the country to vote on things and
to discuss. It was a representative democracy. They were picked, because
they weren’t overburdened with expectations of what a ruler should be.
There were also places where people were invited to vote on things. The
way they would vote, because there was a lot of illiteracy, they would
pick up a white stone and a black stone. They would say who wants this
and white was yes and black was no.
It was so moving how determined they were to amplify their voices
through whatever they had at their disposal. It was that drive to
democratize decision making and to democratize access to power. It was
probably not true on every level, but it opened up what we have today
and that people could point to when there were a bunch of kings that
were out there.
This isn’t how it had to be, but there was this drive to have this
enlightened society and we can draw from the deep well of those stories.
Now even if it is just the way that we speak to each other at dinner
parties, these conversations are very important.
I am a folk singer and I do everything I can so we can calm our minds
and know ourselves through music and culture and maybe fight less wars.
I also pay taxes that pay for wars, so I am also a participant in a war
making world and a war fighting world. It is just another poor boy sent
off to fight a rich man’s war. There are no fast answers here. I hope it
goes the way of child slavery and foot binding (eliminated).
I write songs about things in our lives, so we can just perhaps
recognize ourselves in a poetic landscape (versus) everything being
competitive and paranoid, look over your shoulder, and a judgemental
landscape that our regular lives can feel like. If we can (move) over to
the poetic landscape maybe we are not so amped up that we become a part
of that machinery.
I would like to see a world that has no wars. It is a matter of logic
and not superstition. Someday we are going to realize it,” she says both
passionately and compassionately.
We have just scratched the surface of Hummingbird Highway an
important collection of songs. Dar Williams has the ability to create a
romantic ambience with “Tu Sais Le Printemps,” to amping thinks up with
the fifth track, a cover of Richard Thompson’s “I Want To See the Bright
Lights Tonight,” to “Olive Tree,” which reminds us why we need to hold
our freedom, our democracies, so dear and not be relegated once again to
serfdom from an era we thought disappeared centuries ago.
Dar Williams is a talented singer, songwriter and musician and that goes
without saying, but she also has the ability to curate feelings of her
audience, of the common folk and meet us where we are and to express in
a Pete Seger sort of way, with gentleness, in kindness, but with
strength what needs to be said. Perhaps she is the female Pete Seger of
this generation.
The album is being
released on September 12 (2025),
go here to
pre-order.
#DarWilliam #DarWilliamsInterview #RivetingRiffsMagazine #RivetingRiffs #WomenInMusic #EntrevistaEnMusica #DarWilliamsEntrevista #MujeresEnMusica #RevistaRivetingRiffs
|
We
would be remiss if we did not mention the musicians who are the music
accompaniment to the cinematic feel that Dar Williams’ beautiful lyrics
and music paint. We wonder who will first feature this song in a
romantic film. There is such a distinct European feel with about
one-third of the lyrics in Frenc and the rest in English. Bryn Roberts
is magical on piano, Dan Reiser is subtle and smooth on drums, Todd
Horton’s flugelhorn and alto trumpet add another layer, as Mike
Visceglia plays acoustic bass and Rich Hinman provides an acoustic and
electric guitar accompaniment. That last word in the previous sentence
is what makes this song work so well. The instrumentals never overpower
the vocals. Imagine if you will a conversation between the instruments
and the vocals and that is what you have in this song, one more it seems
that arises out of reflection and fondness. 