The bus driver was in hell.”Īll of this time steeped in the music of her fellow musicians inspired many of the songs for The Green World, Dar’s fourth studio album, recorded with seasoned musicians and future bandmates in Woodstock and New York City. The bus was careening down the highway from Denver to Aspen, and we spent hours trying to find the perfect notes. For all three artists, dubbed a Folk Supergroup (not by them), it was both a musical education and huge life adventure.ĭar says, “We were trying to get this one line for the last chorus of Sweet Sir Galahad that we were going to sing with Joan. They invited Lucy Kaplansky to join them and Cry Cry Cry was born in 1998, with a short tour that kept getting longer, stretching out for over a year and a half. Somewhere around Portland, Oregon, they decided to make an album that would showcase all the great writing that was happening in their tightknit musical community. Her good friend Richard Shindell joined the official End of the Summer album tour. Psychotherapy, veterans with PTSD, and late night radio DJs among other themes.īooked in large theaters, she went out with her first band on her first tour bus with The End of Summer, playing more colleges and festivals, including Lilith Fair, for which one of her songs became part of the festival’s gold-selling CD. She continued to write about all the eclectic things that inspired her, never questioning the muse. She wrote the title track in hotel rooms down the west coast on her tour with Joan. With the release of Mortal City came an invitation to play throughout Europe and the United States with new friend and folk legend, Joan Baez, a tour that changed everything, as Dar was quick to discover by 1997 when she released End of the Summer. The mid-nineties were a heady time, and Dar did her best to keep up with an exciting mix of concerts in forty plus states, Canadian festivals, and her first British dates. She also signed with Razor & Tie records and penned the material for her next album, Mortal City. By the end of 1994, when The Honesty Room came out, she had rock-solid management, the best booking agency in the country for singer-songwriters, and a career-making slot at the Newport Folk Festival. Little did she know that the coffeehouse scene and the beginnings of internet communities were building to a crescendo and eager to receive her warm, witty songs. She hoped the songs she was writing, with titles like When I Was a Boy, You’re Aging Well, and The Great Unknown, would lead her into an idiosyncratic part-time music career. When she felt like the noise of Boston was getting to be too much, the muse led her to the cornfields and college towns of Western Massachusetts where she sat on her futon and wrote the songs that would become The Honesty Room, her first CD, which she recorded in the basements and back woods studios of Amherst. She went to three or four open mics or song circles a week and recorded two cassettes. She opened a trunk of old songs and started writing new ones. But she was in Boston, and the muse led her into the myriad open mics and tip jar gigs of booming folk revival. When she was up in Somerville, Massachusetts in the early nineties, knowing that she wanted to pursue music or theater, she worked backstage at the Opera Company of Boston and wrote plays on the side. Dar Williams has always followed her muse.
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