Last night folk singer Dar Williams not only delighted the crowd with her poetic storytelling lyrics and skillful guitar playing, but she allowed us a glimpse of her artistic and personal inspiration.
Mixed in with her songs were anecdotes from her college career at Wesleyan, her fourth grade teacher Mrs. Frickler and the inspiration she drew from Yoko Ono. Her sense of humor and down-to-earth attitude gave insight into her very personal music.
She started the evening with an upbeat favorite "Christians and Pagans," which celebrates tolerance and familial love over religious segregation. The energy in her voice and guitar was a relief after the sticky sweetness of the opening singer and guitarist, Jebb Llyod Nickles, whose love songs were a bit too far on the sentimental side.
Many of her songs used the natural world as a metaphor for the internal world of thoughts and emotions. Her songs "End of Summer" and "Spring Street" expressed a personal knowledge of the beauty and peril of the "three" New England seasons, which she described as "winter, mud and construction."
The crowd responded with cheers to her most well-known songs, including "Are You Out There?" and "As Cool As I Am." The audience was peppered with hard-core Dar fans, who knew the words to all her songs, but there were also many of us who couldn't sing along whole-heartedly when she invited us to join her because we were hearing her music for the first time.
One of her most interesting songs was entitled "When I Was a Boy," which deals with the gender roles that people assume at different stages in their lives. At the end of the song she describes her male friend who says "I was a girl once too."
Williams dedicated one of her songs, "February," a bittersweet ballad of love and loss, in memory of the recent deaths in our community.
At this point, the audience not only became a fan of Dar's music, but also of her beautiful personality. She received a standing ovation and returned to perform two more songs as an encore.
Interestingly, she ended the concert with a song entitled "Alleluia," a word that in the Christian tradition, is not supposed to be uttered during these next 40 days of Lent.
As she told the crowd last night, Williams sometimes feels the need to assert her independence and break the rules to stay artistically alive.
Williams started off at the beginning of her career with visions of being a playwright -- she directed and wrote plays and operas in Boston for some time -- and says this background helps inform her songs.
She told The Dartmouth in a recent interview that while at Wesleyan, "I learned a lot about narrative, I got really excited about storytelling in general and I learned about character development as well."
Her songs portray her sentiments well. From "What Do You Hear In These Sounds," off her "Mortal City" album, to her "?," each lyric tells the tale of a character with whom many fans identify.
Upon exiting a crowded Spaulding Auditorium, my date and I decided that if Dar went to Dartmouth, she's the kind of woman we (and anyone who likes interesting people with great senses of humor) would definitely want as a friend.
In fact, some of us may get the chance to meet Dar face to face, as she expressed the desire to come to classes today.
Someone in the audience enthusiastically suggested "Earth Science 1!" but I have a feeling Dar's tastes run more along the lines of the drama, poetry and music.
Keep your eye out though for a fiery Sagittarius, with a "strong pair of legs," as she described herself.
