Dar Williams: Big Sister

by Peter Aaron and photographs by Fionn Reilly, June 28, 2011

A girl sits on the edge of her bed. She’s overwhelmed by the looming adult world before her, wracked with the confusion that comes with trying to figure out her place in it. Or, really, if she even wants any part of it at all. Hell, she’s still not even sure exactly who she is yet, much less what everyone else wants of her. Her head and her heart combine to form a churning cauldron of a million conflicting thoughts, about society, sexuality, politics, spirituality, careers, the planet. She feels like she’s drowning. And very much alone.

But songs help. Especially beautifully crafted, movingly sung songs that come from the perspective of someone who’s been right where she is now and made it through—and become a stronger, more aware, and more self-assured person in the process. Songs like “It’s Alright,” “As Cool as I Am,” “The Great Unknown,” and “Buzzer.” Dar Williams’s songs.

One of pop folk’s leading singer-songwriters, Williams is beloved for her questioning and deeply personal narratives; tunes whose wry, minutely focused observations—often quite humorous in their irony—pinpoint the poetry and paradoxes of everyday life. Her steadfast stance and frequent addressing of gender issues have made her a paragon of the so-called women’s music movement, a mantle she never consciously courted but one she’s worn with pride since the identity-straddling “When I Was a Boy,” from her 1993 debut, The Honesty Room (reissued in 1995 by Razor & Tie Records, home to all her subsequent albums), became an anthem for many.
“I’ve always been a feminist, but I really lucked out by being embraced by such a passionate and seriously committed audience so early on,” says Williams, who lives in Cold Spring with her husband, Michael Robinson, and their two children. “I guess [“When I Was a Boy”] sort of came out of me being a tomboy as a kid in the ’70s, and picking up on the androgyny of everyone with their Dorothy Hamill/John Denver hairdos.”

This kind of vivid imagery comes naturally to Williams, a storyteller at heart. In addition to the story-songs that fill her 11 official albums, she’s authored two novels targeted at young girls (2004’s Amalee and 2008’s Lights, Camera, Amalee ; both, Scholastic Books), a road guide for natural foodies (The Tofu Tollbooth ; Ceres Press, 1998), and, now, a children’s play, “The Island Musical.” Given the “liberal and loving” and very literate Chappaqua household in which she was raised, it’s not too hard to see where her love of words and the performing arts stems from.

“My dad went to Yale and was a medical writer and editor, and my mom went to Vassar and worked with Planned Parenthood, which I’m very proud of,” says the singer, who was born Dorothy Snowden Williams in 1967 and whose nickname is a family truncation of that of the character Darcy from Pride And Prejudice. “We had a lot of classical albums, a lot of show tunes, all alphabetized. I loved the Beatles, Jim Croce, Crosby, Stills and Nash; poets who wrote melodic, story-based songs. I remember really being into my vocabulary books when I was in sixth grade, and I guess that’s when I really started to fall in love with words.”  Williams began learning guitar at age nine and wrote her first songs soon after, yet by high school she’d become more interested in sports. But when an ankle injury landed her on the bench she took to theater, writing plays and stage music. By her senior year she seemed to have found her voice as a playwright, and was on her way to majoring in theater and religion at Wesleyan University. It all sounds pretty idyllic, so where does the angst come in?