A Quote by Dar Williams

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.

Dar Williams

Quote Topics

About Album Also California City England February Figure Geography Influenced Iowa Landscape Live Metaphors Mortal Much New New England New York Northwest Ocean Pacific Pacific Northwest Philadelphia Really Song Songs Southern Southern California Very Whole York

Quote Author

Dar Williams
American - Musician
Born: April 19, 1967

I don't necessarily notice too much of a change in the sense of the kind of matches that I have in say a Los Angeles as opposed to a New York City. The big difference that I notice, and this is what all love as New York city and Philadelphia has treated me fantastically, but man, you cannot screw up in Philadelphia and New York.

Adam Cole

I lived in New York City for a while and miss it like it's a person. Although I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, I'm a New Yorker at heart. A stroll through Central Park, a visit to the MET, a show on Broadway. There is no other city like it in the world!

Zoe McLellan

I've lived in New York City all my life. I love New York City; I've never moved from New York City. Have I ever thought about moving out of New York? Yeah, sure. I need about $10 million to do it right, though.

El-P

According to the Rand McNally Places-Rated Almanac, the best place to live in America is the city of Pittsburgh. The city of New York came in twenty-fifth. Here in New York we really don't care too much. Because we know that we could beat up their city anytime.

David Letterman

Chicago seems to follow New York, and coming from New York and being in real estate, I worry about things happening in Chicago that have happened in New York. I've seen a great city like New York go downhill. It has a wonderful financial downtown, but the rest of the city is not very nice.

Jerry Reinsdorf

The Green New Deal is for elitists who live in their high rises in New York City and see a dirty world around them because they're in New York City. I said New York City can pass a Green New Deal... Why not try it? Why not try it?

Dan Crenshaw

I don't want to make light of the importance of my musical upbringing, as you cannot avoid being influenced by the area you grow up, but I will say that Reykjavik's geography is very different from, say, New York, Paris, or Copenhagen. There's big skies. The buildings are low. The landscape is spread out.

Johann Johannsson

My parents retired to New York City, and my brother and both of my sisters ended up in New York City. We are all New York City transplants from Pennsylvania.

Steven Pasquale

Eventually, I decided that if I was going to really write a novel, I couldn't do it in New York City while holding down a job. You need a constant money source to live in New York City unless you're independently wealthy, which I'm not.

Rachel Kushner

New York has arguably become the quintessential 1 percent city, a city that has been so given over to the rich that you now have to be rich to live here. Or not live here: New York's also a preferred destination for foreign money spent on vast, lifeless apartments in the sky that are occupied a couple of weeks a year at most.

Graydon Carter

I feel the change. I feel the relationship with New York changing. It's a personal relationship you have with the city when you move there. I definitely romanticize the early 2000s. As much as I prefer the city then as opposed to now, I'm sure if I were 23 and I moved to the New York of right now, I could have the same exact experience. I don't really hate the cleaning up of New York, even though it's not my preferred version of New York.

Brian Degraw

Growing up so close to New York City, I always loved going to the city, but I'd be disappointed because songs about New York always made it seem so magical and perfect, and when I was younger, I just thought it was busy and dirty.

Grace VanderWaal

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!"

Dar Williams

A lot of the reason I left New York, in addition to being so broke, was that I just felt I was becoming provincial in that way that only New Yorkers are. My points of reference were really insular. They were insular in that fantastic New York way, but they didn't go much beyond that. I didn't have any sense of class and geography, because the economy of New York is so specific. So I definitely had access and exposure to a huge variety of people that I wouldn't have had if I'd stayed in New York - much more so in Nebraska even than in L.A.

Meghan Daum

I think as much as the city is changing us, our experience inside the city also changes. I think, a city like Cairo - and it's interesting because yesterday, a friend of mine told me the same this thing about New York - is a city that you can't control. It's very bold and very aggressive, and it will constantly resist any attempt at control. But even though you can't control it, you can find your path within the city. You can come to a better understanding of your relationship with it.