Top 109 Quotes & Sayings by Dar Williams - Page 2

I fear that to fall in love with you is to fall from a great and gruesome height.

I started going out with one of my managers and he really grew me up in a lot of ways. He introduced me not just to being a full-time traveler, which I was, but he was also really very interested in history and art and continued to open my eyes up to regional history; less splashy histories. He was interested in historical societies and stuff like that. He introduced me to a way of looking at the way communities form that is the foundation for the book that I've just finished writing that has to do with what I see as effective community-building wherever I've been traveling.

What happened on "As Cool As I Am" was, you know how in the `90s, "the personal is political, the political is personal"? That was a really big thing. Choices you made about how you recorded and what instruments you used and how much real versus how much synthetic. Those were choices that were seen as very political at the time.

Why wouldn't you want to be the envy of your neighbors by being so good and so generous and so smart in how you use the power that you obviously have? That's my patriotism.

The kind of organic wave, the way that waves move, and I'm not just talking about feminism, the way that a social movement might rise like a wave. It's harder to build any kind of wave now. Things are important to you and then they recede within a day. That's the only thing that keeps me from believing that there's going to be any one organic big wave; although the Americana (music) thing has been happening for a while.

I would encourage people to bridge broadly and creatively in their communities, not just because that creates the most fun and resiliency, but also because it creates the most points of access for people to be part of the community, which is what democracy is at its best.

There was a lot of distance between the Dar of The Honesty Room and the Dar of Mortal City, so there was no attempt.

A lot of the songs are pretty unmasked. If you listen to "As Cool As I Am," it's not all that different from what you were hearing from Ani DiFranco and some of the other indie women artists of the time. It was still in that context, still seen as folk music.

I spent a year pulling all-nighters and driving around in a really tiny fuel-efficient car relying on the kindness of strangers and seeing this incredible range of landscapes throughout the United States. That's what happened with The Honesty Room. It was a huge night and day switch.

I came out of that and said I don't want to go back to feeling depressed. So I asked myself, what can I be optimistic about, in terms of the course of the planet? And I discovered there was no end to the optimism I felt.

And the ones that know you so well are the ones that can swallow you whole.

It's a collective truth that slavery is wrong, that child labor is wrong, that gross inequality is wrong. God didn't send it.

Empires are doomed. They become more diffuse, more broke, demagogues rule, and so I was just pointing out some similarities between past empires and what's going on right now. They all have had to apply more and more harsh rhetoric of superiority and divine right to justify the building of hegemony.

I am one of those sort of "lesser" types, those sensitive types, those people who wouldn't have made it on their own if other people hadn't helped them. A straightforward capitalist society would've cut them off and let them die. So I was saved by my friends and by my family and by people who cared about me, and by modern psychotherapy that cared about women.

The rest of the songs on the album [Mortal City ] have spare arrangements on them. Steve [Miller], really loved that. He'd just come off of a project with someone who basically had to mask the fact that there were no songs there with production. He said, "Oh, my God, you have real songs here!"

I'm amazed at the adolescent nature of some of the religious fanatics in our government. And they're full of double standards.

Hegemony is not defined by rivers or conventional borders - it's dominance, it's influence. So we get to decide in our hearts, are we in Iraq to help restore something, or are we there to establish dominance? How can you torture people and say, well, that's just a few bad apples in our culture?

A lot of men were also becoming more attuned and less afraid of women [in the nineties ].

There's tons of anger and angst and peculiarity and eccentricity, and good towns know that that's okay. But towns that are kind of bullshit don't know what to do with all those feelings.

Every time you opt in to kindness Make one connection, used to divide us It echoes all over the world

I'm just trying to be part of the movement that decentralizes and hopefully creates peace. By supporting smaller, democratic structures, you can effect change.

Every once in a while I'll say something...I dropped the F-bomb early on in my career. There was this lesbian couple and they looked super-hip. One of them looked at me and shook her head, like "Don't do that." I think she was doing it to say, "It doesn't work." She didn't say anything but it was this cautionary moment. I knew it didn't work. There are just so many other words to choose from.

Now that I believe in God, I have an extra layer of saying I'll write about what I write about and assume that I'm being offered the opportunity to illuminate something important. But when you think you are too important, you become some sort of fascist.

I remember doing "As Cool As I Am" and Steve Miller, the producer, saying "I really hear a drum loop here. I want to play it for you." When I wrote it, I thought, "This isn't going to sound very folky. I don't think it's going to go with mandolins and banjos." Then he played the loop for me and it sounded right.

It's just that you don't have to bring it to every stage. You can do a fundraiser for people that you support. You don't necessarily have to talk about one thing or another when you're on your own.

I think we're coming to a place where we're saying all war is wrong. We might even learn something about the sensationalism we get caught up in with people like Donald Trump.

What was nice about the nineties is that it was an example of music that responded to a desire of the times. It spoke to the social conditions of the times. Women were making more money. Women were saying, "My voice counts. If we're going out on a Friday night, I don't want to see a Rambo movie. I want to go see a singer/songwriter who sings about my life".

I've watched towns and cities evolve and become very resilient, and fun, and unique, and prosperous on their own terms. And the secret is bridging. It's when the local church has a fun clothing swap fundraiser with a temple, and then the next year they bring in the mosque.

When people in government [make mistakes], they don't say, those people in the government. They say, we've got a problem to solve.

I have odometer readings, kids; all sorts of measurements of what I've been doing for the last 20 years. I get it. I get that it was a while ago.

I would push for more production and Steve Miller would say, "Why do you want to have more production when you have real songs? You don't want to cover up the song."

There was this moment in 2003 when I was asked to do a fundraiser for someone who was speaking out against the Iraq war when nobody was. I said, "I will do a fundraiser for that guy." And then my friend John Hall, from the band Orleans...He ran for Congress in my district and won. I did a bunch of fundraisers for him.

I went from having three little jobs that I strung together to being on the road full-time; having some savings that my managers told me to spend. You fly all over the country opening for these other people. You pay a publicist to get some press while you're establishing yourself and you will be solvent in this career forevermore.

Just like my career, I've sung the same songs night after night in so many ways. It's always different because every space is different. I lost my mojo once. It was like Austin Powers. I don't know why or how, but I had to get it back. And I did.

I think the music was speaking to that opening up of whose voice gets heard and how multidimensional that voice can be.

There are a lot of people out there who are exactly half extrovert and half introvert and they love to be extroverts as long as they have enough time to go off and figure it all out.

As I said in one of my songs, we're still abolishing slavery, but nobody says it's a good thing. Nobody justifies it.

I just think the reassurance and the steadiness and the hands-on kindness can make a huge difference.

Mortal City was really influenced by geography. [The song] "The Ocean" is the Pacific Northwest. Southern California and New York also figure into songs, and Iowa. "February" is very much about New England. "Mortal City" is Philadelphia. The whole album is this anthropomorphized landscape where the metaphors live in this geography.

The only I would say is a little different is when I know my parents are in the audience. That's never going to be the same as another concert.

[Mortal City ] was also the beginning of the reality of the fact that I was going to have little pieces of my personality identifying with all of these different parts of the country.

For my 50th birthday I just want to make it all make sense [being exactly half introvert], and then a couple of weeks later do the blow-out with all my friends.

There was one tour where I thought, "If I can't get this feeling back of being excited to be on the stage, then I will quit." Because I have friends who have dialed it in and I watch their concerts and shake my head. I'm sure the audience can tell, too.

I went to Canada and played in this tiny bar where the windows were steaming up and everybody was so animated and singing along right there at the foot of the stage, looking up, and I got my mojo back .

You know how people say they're either like a cat or a dog? I feel like a cat. I just want to be alone. Isn't that weird? It's a lot to take in.

The biggest difference would be made if we don't have wars to begin with.

I am happy to do political fundraisers. I always hope that my friends will be, too. It's part of who you are and you shouldn't feel ashamed of what you believe in.

We have evolved to understand that language of power that's taken too much.

We all do the wrong thing. And then we have to wake up the next morning and live with the fact that we have done things that are wrong.