33 rebellions per minute
"Down any course that fits within a fifty-minute hour"
1995
Dar Williams, THE HONESTY ROOM
Last month, using Instant Messenger as I so often do at 2 a.m. when too many of the real parties are closed on account of vomit stains, I started a promising casual friendship with some Florida gal named Elizabeth, inspired by her profile, which read, in entirety, "At the crossroads of disaster and an imperfect smile". It's a striking phrase, so I suspect I'd've said hi if I'd never heard it before; given that I believe the point of a profile is to seize attention, I become easily impressed by _any_ sign of frontal-lobe activity, after a long run of profiles that say nothing more distinctive than "I'm friendly and I like to meet new people" or "Well I am a 16 Yr old female, from the stix of Alabama. I like R+B and rap, u can IM me, dont if u want to cyber, I ain't into that shit." As it happens, though, I took the "crossroads" quote, correctly, as a sign that Elizabeth is a fellow fan of its author Dar Williams, and therefore, by simple deduction, a good person to know. She sees, nothing wrong with this sort of logic (her joking 1st-conversation proposal of marriage to me followed immediately my own kind mention of Crowded House's album TOGETHER ALONE), and goodness knows I've encountered it before. Two of my closer friendships started in mutual They Might Be Giants fandom, another in a fondness for Soul Asylum, and several of casual friends have come into my life from the Loud-fans, whose more eager participants have formed dozens of close friendships and two marriages, begun on a shared fondness for Scott Miller's songs. Music to friendship is normal, even for the "stix of Alabama" girl. It seems to work. Perhaps I shouldn't question it.
It is in trying to specify _why_ music taste should be a bridge among people that doubts start to pop up. A huge portion of anyone's reaction to music is physiological, automatic: this sounds good to me, this sounds bad. I think Sarah Michelle Gellar is unbelievably gorgeous, I think Uma Thurman is, whatever, passably attractive; if you think the reverse, it would never occur to me to think the less of you, any more than I think less of my straight-female or gay-male friends who find Sarah less attractive than (ucch!) Tom Cruise. Hormones are stupid anyway -- if they weren't, they'd waste no time on some actress I or you will never meet -- and most of us are bright enough to watch their antics with both a- and be-musement. The fact that I would rather listen to the compositions of Bela Bartok or Edgar Varese than those of Wolfgang Mozart or Johann Bach might seem, superficially, like it might have more mind (as opposed to mere brain) content: something about a belief that art should be radical, maybe. But no, really, I just like them better, my nerves do. Note, for supporting evidence of irrationality, that I also prefer fellow baroque composer Georg Telemann to Bach, which is like preferring the Monkees to the Beatles. For that matter, in jazz, Archie Shepp's FIRE DANCES strikes me as exhilarating, John Coltrane's GIANT STEPS as pointless, and my knowledge of jazz is so appallingly dim that I haven't a clue which might be radical or which conservative.
Indeed, if I'd been raised on Brahms, or Miles Davis, or Howlin' Wolf, or Nusret Fateh Ali Khan, it can reasonably be guessed that my entire tastes in music would be different. That, I'm sure, has something to do with why, even though Nirvana's NEVERMIND and Live's THROWING COPPER and Radiohead's THE BENDS are albums I love in a field I do understand, I can't recall ever judging anyone more favorably for liking them. Fans of Nirvana/Live/Radiohead, more often than not (say the statistics), are people who were just a decade off from loving Human League/Duran Duran/Flock Of Seagulls instead, and why would I need that? But that's actually a small flaw. A larger is that Nirvana and Live and Radiohead are albums centered on passion, on unraveling, on catharsis attempted from the edge of complete collapse. They're done brilliantly, I think, but I am not, personally, a specialist at being frayed. I doubt I want to seek people who _are_ specialists at being frayed. The closest thing to anger I displayed this week was quietly hanging up on a customer who wouldn't stop screaming at me long enough for me to explain that no, her catalog had not given away her credit card number; and even that hang-up was something I'd not done before, and I was so dazed and shocked at myself that it took me over 30 seconds before I had my nose buried happily again in Lois McMaster Bujold's Warrior's Apprentice (recommended by Elizabeth, in fact, and a charming, addictive bit of space opera despite my creeping suspicion that its eventual storyline will be one to make Ayn Rand smile).
What I've decided, on pondering the issue, is that it's useful to seek friendships among an artist's fans _if_ the artist's dominant, most visible traits happen to be among the traits you most value in your friends. By that I can think of four bands whom I, personally, would logically be well-advised seek fans of -- conveniently, I frequently do. A fondness or distaste for the Loud Family could, sure, be based on completely amoral and random tastes in melodies, guitar tones, or singing voices; but almost every attempt to summarize the band ends up mentioning Scott's hopelessly compulsive analyzing of everything, his goofy wordplay, and his "shooting himself in the foot" (quoting several people there) by rewriting, every three minutes, the rules of how pop songs are built. A love of They Might Be Giants is almost certainly going to include an endorsement of two or more of the crucial beliefs that: toys are fun, life is fun, social ineptitude is only skin deep, and the best jokes are the ones that redesign the entire world of logic to fit their author's whim. To enjoy Jane Siberry's prime albums (NO BORDERS HERE, THE SPECKLESS SKY) is to at least tolerate her whimsy and romantic longings, and to endorse songs that tend to be explicitly about -- as well as being sonic demonstrations of -- the life-affirming joy of creating new things, making them perfect, and maintaining them properly.
Dar Williams, my 4th quasi-litmus-test idol, stands as my shining example of Sanity. She is a folksinger, and she writes traditionally lovely winding melodies, and her voice is pure and flexible and comforting, and I would find her no worse than pleasant on those grounds alone. She is also a storyteller. She observes the world closely, for one modest virtue, and she observes the parts _I_ care about, the parts that reflect people. "My friends gave me purple flowers and orange tea, on goosedown spilling quilts and turquoise chairs", in "Arrival", is merely the setting for "we greet each other with a wild profusion of words". The "cranberry bog" and "dark smell of brine" in "Flinty Kind Of Woman" are mere background for the swaggery Confederate pride of "but it's a victory won/ and it couldn't be done/ by the hippy-dippy flaky-shaky fun-in-the-sun braless wonders" and "there's an angry God gonna strike it/ yeah, that's what we pay Him for" -- linguistically nailing both the sense of ironic awareness and the deeper sense of resolve our outmedia-ed narrator should indeed have. "This Is Not The House That Pain Built", the most physically detailed song on HONESTY ROOM (her third album, but the first anyone including me can actually find), is using her roadmap-to-home warnings about "just make sure your car's got good shocks/ there's steep hills, there's potholes, there's rocks" as a metaphor. "Traveling Again"'s landscape has long since been humanized, with dirt roads and highway signs. And the trees on "When I Was A Boy" are for climbing, of course! "I won't forget when Peter Pan came to my house, took my hand. I said I was a boy; I'm glad he didn't check".
Next up on my list of Dar's storytelling virtues is one that would be small and incomplete, were it left unattended: she has firm opinions about the world that very closely fit mine, and she's not embarrassed to sometimes drop masks of subtlety to express them. "The Great Unknown"'s describes our nation's ever-wealthier children in a skeptical, disillusioned "I am the brainchild, I am the mortar/ with a plastic trophy and an eating disorder/ and a vision as big as a great big wall". Which pairs with "…Boy"'s "I know things have gotta change/ they've got pills to sell, they've got implants to put in, they've got implants to remove". The child narrating "the Babysitter's Here" thinks their hippychick love-everybody overseer is the coolest sitter they've ever had or imagined, and Naive Viewpoint aside, Dar clearly agrees. "You're Aging Well" fantasizes seeing society's subliminal messages on roadsigns - "you never can win", "watch your back", "where's your husband" - and repainting them as "I'm so glad you finally made it here", "you thought nobody cared, but I did, and I could tell", "this is your year", "it always starts here". A secular paradise built on the best aspects of our human natures; whereas "Alleluliah", a song about afterlife paradise, is a gag. Right on.
As important as the cleverness or the surface rightness of the observations, though, is that Dar Williams songs never ever fall into the shallow fallacies they sometimes skirt the edges of. "…Boy" neither embraces nor fully rejects sex roles, but shows romantic partners struggling to use their histories to erase the very real barriers. "Alleluliah"'s impact, beyond the laughs, is in precisely Dar's failure to imagine a heaven free of infuriating human quirks - because how can we be eternally happy without failing to be ourselves, but what could it to mean to live forever if we're forced to be someone (something) else? "…Unknown" is intelligently anxious about high tech, but is a sympathetic non-heroic portrait of the people who brought it about. "When Sal's Burned Down" defends its nostalgia for community and downtown while being unflinching about the noise, mob exclusivity, and lack of other life choices that helped make it possible. "Babysitter…"'s plot depends on the facts that idealism can be as much a costume as any other pose, and that sweet people have no especial gift for good judgment of others. "Traveling…" and "In Love But Not At Peace" each show, in their own way, how pursuing happiness can be far more comfortable and familiar than finding it. I still haven't figured out everything in "Mark Rothko Song", but there's already too much there for one sentence of summary. What I am sure is "Arrival"'s straightforwardly happy ending of the album should be taken straight, and that someone who can preach love so convincingly and cheerfully is someone to be admired.
The musical arrangements on HONESTY ROOM are quiet, largely acoustic, and refined; I think it's the best produced of her records. "Alleluhia" is an electric major-key singalong, and "Flinty…" is gruffly sung over aggressive violin, handclaps, and rock quartet, but there's stuff on Simon and Garfunkel's SOUNDS OF SILENCE that's more overdriven. "In Love…" and "I Love, I Love", on the other hand, are contemplatively sung over nothing but acoustic guitar; "Rothko…" is giddier and "…Boy" works more dialogue into the wistfulness, but they use the same instrumentation. "Arrival" adds only cello. But even on these songs, the arrangement never seems trivial, the few modest string-by-string strums placed carefully to set off the tale and to launch the modest leaps in melodic structure. "…Unknown" branches into synthesizer atmospherics, and it's all the contrast one could ask for. Turn the volume up for all the songs equally, and let the details sink in at their chosen measured pace.
1996
Dar Williams, MORTAL CITY
Dar's 4th album (and second findable one) advertises, on its opening track, a much larger stylistic jump than the album produces. "As Cool As I Am" rumbles in energetically on a drum-loop, harmonica, didgideroo, congas, and full rock-band treatment. It is, as it happens, one of my half-dozen or so favorite pop songs in the world. It's the song Alanis's "You Oughtta Know" would've been with an extra ten years to think; with the frankness to admit "I'd say I feel a little worse than I did when we met", with the confidence to shrug "I don't know what you saw/ I want somebody who sees me", with the self-recognition to answer her ex's girl-watching ("You play the artist, saying 'Is it how she moves or how she looks?'") with an empathetic indictment of both of them ("I'd say it's loneliness, suspended to our own by grappling hooks"). Her well-wishing of her ex is more genuine than Alanis's "I'm sure she'll make a really excellent mother", but also funnier, more knowing. Her real interest goes out to his next intended target: "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". If Dar is my patron saint of sanity, "As Cool…" is her deliberate under-pressure showpiece. If you have any doubts about the narrator's genuine mood, then the worst assumption you could make is that she's teaching strength to others as a way of finding it herself. And that's eminently sane too.
"February" sets the real, resumed musical pattern: just voice, guitar, cello, and her typical octave-spanning melody, one of many that could be traded straight up for one by Richard Shindell, who is becoming my second-favorite folk storyteller. "Iowa", two guitars and a dobro, uses my home state only for its all-vowel sound, luxuriously harmonized. "The Christians and the Pagans"'s vocals bound eagerly ahead of their electric accompaniment, while cheery "doo-wah-ah" backup vocals fill any remaining holes, but "This Was Pompeii" is skeletal and slow. "The Ocean", full-band plus fiddle, slowly swells to a rousing crescendo featuring John Prine on second vocals, but "Family" retains only the fiddle as the sound falls once more to the level where the listener has to lean in, participatorily, towards the stage so as not to miss everything. "The Pointless, Yet Poignant, Crisis of a Co-ed" is stripped down and perky like some unholy cross between Alanis, Cole Porter, and a tie-dyed cross-legged first-grade music teacher. "The Blessings" is back to full-band but gets much of its somewhat lurching rock energy from Dar's unusally percussive vocals; "Southern California Wants To Be Western New York", jaunty and reassuring, is back down to guitars and mandolin. "Mortal City", the hypnotic closer, is a genuine experiment, sung as if her speaking voice simply happens to land on notes, textured like Laurie Anderson processing a 7+ minute contemplation out of piano and cello.
This time her stories touch on how romances are affected by all the time the pre-existing world steals from them; and on the use of family to heal the scars of the outside world; and on the relative mainstreaming of wicca; and on the strength of hemp fibers compared to standard American rope manufacture; and on tourists visiting the sites of disasters; and on how present disasters can bring strangers to opportunity to help one another out and thereby notice each other's existence; and on the nyaa-nyaa pleasure of Eurodisney's failure; and on how history doesn't have to be painless for roots to be a lovely thing; and on why "Students Against the Treacherous Use of Fur" would be a stupid name for an activist group. And a hundred other things: about half the songs are set as metaphors this time, for one thing. MORTAL CITY may be her cleverest album, or her funniest, and is surely the most intentionally reassuring. I think it's great, but then, I rarely think she isn't.
1997
Dar Williams, END OF THE SUMMER
END OF THE SUMMER is Dar's "rock" record, the one I loved first and then discovered the rest of her work because of. If "Cool As I Am" is my favorite of her songs, END has my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th faves. Those songs rock. "Are You Out There"'s guitars churn ominously, the drums thump and echo, the synthesizers make like harmonicas, sounding all-in-all like a folksinger's compromise between Echo and the Bunnymen's "Killing Moon" and John Wesley Harding's charged psychedelic cover of Roky Erickson's "If You Have Ghosts". "What Do You Hear In These Sounds" has a similarly dark bridge but otherwise puts her calm spin on the JAGGED LITTLE PILL formula, with modestly more exotic percussion. "Teenagers, Kick Our Butts" is peeling 4-chord rock of the Tom Petty/ Odds variety, albeit proving that a more ambitious vocal melody can fit the simple pattern.
They aren't my favorite Dar songs simply from the music, of course. "Are…" is 2147th in the line of songs about using radio as community and escape, but doesn't fool itself into thinking radio is good enough: telling a DJ "you were more familiar than the party" damns her peers as much as it praises Jimmy Olsen or Johnny Memphis, and the need for Teen culture is seen, in part, as a reaction to being shut out. "Corporate parents, corporate town, I know every TV set that has them lit/ they preach that I should save the world, they pray that I don't do a better job of it". "What…" goes from its therapy jokes ("when I hit a rut, he says to try the other parent") to being a song about finding the clues to the universe in its smallest artifacts (CD's, for example?), and from that to testing her insecurities against the almost universal assumption that everyone else is comfier and more secure in their emotions than she is or you are. "Teenagers…" is a direct call to idealism, and the first country to adopt it as its National Anthem is the country I will make the rest of my life in happily.
"Party Generation", giddy four-chord rock the way Peter Paul and Mary might've played it had they ever tried, celebrates a 34-year-old birthday boy's attempt to act half his age for a night, and lays the signs of hollowness - "In the morning they sent him home with the designated driver/…/and he looked up at the photo that he'd picked up at the junkshop/ it was only 50 cents, but he'd framed it and everything/ it was the kind of party that you hope never ends" - only bare enough to draw your attention if you want it there, because hey, he really is trying to be happy and deserves support. But "Bought and Sold", the last rock song, simmering rather than cooking, is a near-defeated indictment of the reign of profit: "Cause there's a monster on the outskirts, and it knows what your town needs/ then it eats us up like nothing and it won't spit out the seeds/ and we can be super shoppers, we can say we're really smart/ we can say our town is doing fine without a beating heart".
The rock songs are my favorite Dar half-album. The folk songs are more stripped down than ever, and for my judgment this contributes to bad pacing, the blare of the anthems drowning out the quieter, more personal and more intricate stories between them. "If I Wrote You", a gorgeous Tom Paxton-y duet with Richard Shindell with an atmosphere helpfully constructed using bodhran and pandeiro (?), suffers not at all, and the glimmering title track rides an exceptionally well-crafted melody. But "My Friends", to me, virtually disappears in "Teenagers"'s shadow. "Road Buddy" is briskly paced like an Aimee Mann using 10 times as many words; but although her disappointment with the adventure of a road trip is mostly a disappointment at the realization that truth is not necessarily best found at tourist stops and nature scenes "in the magazines I have at home", some Mann-like venom at her trip partner spills out. With the result that "It's A War In There", which has some of the minor-key shimmer of Sarah McLachlan, lacks the lead-in that would help its consoling lyrics overcome the anxious atmosphere; which then leaves "Better Things", the album-ending cover of an optimistic Kinks song, seeming much less motivated than it is.
Now that I've worked out how the album's pacing misleads me, though, I should be ready to be unaffected by that. If Dar has written this album in a relatively pessimistic mood, she's pessimistic about the right things. More important, the occasional well-earned rant doesn't keep her from insisting on seeing the people around her as people, not functions: even the toll-booth vendor, even the fast-food cashier, even the women at Krispy Kruller's All-Night Sugar Palace at 2 a.m., even the men who no longer date them, even her therapist, even her own best friends. This doesn't help one see the world more _clearly_, mind you; quite the opposite. Just accurately. Sanely. I hope to keep learning the habit from her. I hope to meet plenty of fellow observers who like Dar's style. Meanwhile, as the Kinks wrote (and as she sang with a charming self-consciousness), it's good to see her rocking out.
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