Profound Sound Voice Studio -- What People Are Saying

Thursday, April 10, 2003 — When Dar Williams moved to Northampton nearly a dozen years ago, she was a well-regarded songwriter in Boston. When she left here eight years later, she had toured the country several times, earned outstanding reviews from Rolling Stone and everyone else, performed in America and Europe with Joan Baez and won friends and fans everywhere. Since Williams' move from Northampton to New York, her resume now includes a featured spot last November in Vanity Fair, People Magazine's choice of her new CD as Album Of The Week, and lightning—quick sales of that new CD — it's titled "The Beauty of the Rain" — the moment it hit the shelves.

In the same dozen years, several hundred other dedicated songwriters have lived in the Valley or passed through it, hoping they were en route to major recognition, but they're still waiting. Why has Dar Williams made it?

Clichés about talent and hard work seem to apply to Williams to a degree of detail that eludes other aspiring artists. Besides having the ineffable gift of being in tune with feelings and owning a voice people like to hear, Williams has a subtle sense of humor and is uncommonly intelligent in the intellectual-verbal sense.

In her own view, though, a big part of it is patience. "I remember walking out in Leverett by one of the ponds and deciding how to finish 'When I Was a Boy,' " Williams said last week, speaking of one of the most memorable songs on her album "The Honesty Room."

"I had waited for months to end (the song), because I knew I wasn't saying what I wanted to say. Finally I realized I wanted to end it with a man who said, 'When I was a girl ....' It was a song more about childhood than about feminism. Waiting showed me there was a deeper message in the song than in the confines of my academic philosophy. 'The Honesty Room' was a breakthrough because instead of forcing an ending, I waited long enough to ask myself why I was writing that."

Another reason for her success, Williams thinks, was her good luck in finding managers and agents, notably including the two who worked with her for five years here, Charlie Hunter and Carol Young, and now Ron Fierstein in New York.

"I had the package administratively. You need raw material to offer them, but they need to be in it for the right reasons. There are a lot of bitter people in the business, and they're to be avoided at all costs. They won't let you thrive. Charlie, Carol, Ron — lucky me! I think that has a lot to do with it."

Another Valley music connection Williams mentions when talking of her evolution as a performer is singer/teacher Justina Golden.

"In 1996 I went to Justina for voice lessons, and she was there for the rest of my time in Northampton. I had taken voice lessons out of college, but Justina was the one who really changed everything. I felt more sure-footed, more aware of what I had to do to have a performance I could trust."

Williams has always sung in a calm, unaffected voice, winning listeners by making sense rather than by shouting for attention. The audible difference between her voice on "The Beauty of the Rain" and earlier material is more a matter of improved technique (pitch, breathing) than of a change in style.

"Justina's rule always was, if you were breathing correctly, the pitch would follow," Williams continued. "And singing in Cry Cry Cry (with Lucy Kaplansky and Richard Shindell) tuned me up, because I was singing harmony all the time with two people who have excellent pitch."

Speaking of one's voice as an instrument, she added, "Releasing the voice is like opening a large vessel so something inside you and beyond you can get out. Some would argue it lets your divine self come in."

Williams, who majored in religion at Wesleyan, goes light on the theology, but it informs what she's doing as an artist. "Adults get better at doing things," she said. "Like looking at the inspection sticker on your car and knowing you need to renew it. You get better at the business of life.

"At the same time, when you're younger you can be surprised more easily. You're surprised that taxes are so high, that you're allergic to certain things, that people can hurt you as badly as they do. Now I'm better at not making a fool of myself — but you have to be a fool for somebody. That's my new career obstacle: to know I'm serving a greater thing. If you don't round that corner, you can calcify. If you round it, you know there's better stuff ahead."

The stuff that's here now is mature, sometimes sublimely so. Where "The Honesty Room" is narrative, "The Beauty of the Rain" is reflective. The title song, which begins with a minimalist suggestion of relationship, is typical: "You're just two umbrellas one late afternoon / You don't know the next thing you will say." It ends with a zenlike chorus: "The beauty of the rain is how it falls, how it falls, how it falls."

"Your Fire Your Soul" is a poignant comment on flying home to visit one's family ("...and they'll say they want your story, but they get confused / By all those words you use"). On the tune she calls "my country song," Alison Krauss shares the vocals and each verse ends with the hard-to-forget line: "So when they ask how far love goes / When my job's done you'll be the one who knows." The sole cover song is a fine watercolor-y version of The Band's "Whispering Pines," a choice inspired by her husband, Michael.

Now on a two-month tour that began yesterday in Concord, N.H., and extends as far as the Fillmore in San Francisco before ending at Town Hall in New York on June 7, Williams returns to Northampton this Monday night for a show at the Calvin Theater. The Ben Taylor Band are her guests; her own band includes Ben Butler on guitar, Steve Holley on drums, Carol Steele on percussion, Michael Visceglia on bass and Julie Wolf on keyboards.

Patience Shows Its Beauty for Dar Williams

Patience Shows Its
Beauty for Dar Williams