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".Collection: Friday
And I'll act like I have faith, and like that faith never ends, but I really just have friends.Collection: Have Faith
"Is it how she moves, or how she looks?" I say it's loneliness suspended to our own like grappling hooks, And 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.Collection: Dance
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.Collection: Art
If you're lucky you find something that reflects you, Helps you feel your life, protects you, Cradles you and connects you to everything.Collection: Life
They preach that I should save the world. They pray that I won't do a better job of it.Collection: Jobs
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.Collection: Kindness
There's the wind And the rain And the mercy of the fallen Who say, "Hey, it's not my place To know what's right" There's the weak And the strong And the many stars that guide us We have some of them inside usCollection: Strong
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.Collection: Country
Sixties folk rock was my original muse and the folk audience-people who listen to music off the beaten track-fostered my career. I definitely don't want to abandon the genre but I also need to make sure I'm Dar Williams first.Collection: Careers
...we're all in a soup of trying to live by words, and trying to live by poetry. It's both humbling, and really flattering to know that my words are part of all that.Collection: Trying
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."Collection: Song
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!"Collection: Song
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.Collection: Thinking
Youll almost encounter a superstition amongst musicians, people sort of go through strange rituals, what they need to do to write a song.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Real
There was a lot of distance between the Dar of The Honesty Room and the Dar of Mortal City, so there was no attempt.Collection: Honesty
When people in government [make mistakes], they don't say, those people in the government. They say, we've got a problem to solve.Collection: Mistake
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.Collection: Fun
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.Collection: War
It's a collective truth that slavery is wrong, that child labor is wrong, that gross inequality is wrong. God didn't send it.Collection: Children
As I said in one of my songs, we're still abolishing slavery, but nobody says it's a good thing. Nobody justifies it.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Trying
In terms of our democracy, we are sort of shrugging our shoulders and saying, oh dear, Guantánamo, that's so awful, that's so awful, but it's here. The pendulum usually swings from left to right and then right to left, but there are so many people in power who have taken the pendulum and just pinned it to the right that there is a fear that it's never going to swing back.Collection: Taken
The best, most solid place to stand as you look at our present situation is on a foundation of history. The Roman Empire, the British Empire, and the Nazi empire all have things in common.Collection: Empires
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.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Believe
I'm amazed at the adolescent nature of some of the religious fanatics in our government. And they're full of double standards.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Optimistic
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.Collection: Cutting
Every once in a while I check and I say, do I still believe in God? And the answer is absolutely yes. And then I think, I suppose I should go to church now. But after going to so many churches in my life and trying to go with the flow with so many denominations, Eastern and Western, I don't really feel I need to go to church at all.Collection: Believe
What we need to do is pull the rug out so billionaires in our country wake up one morning and say, wow, 80 percent of the country has a solar panel, and we can't make our billions anymore because other people are making millions, but not billions, on alternative energy that doesn't require war. Suddenly, the war-making machinery is not necessary.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Smart
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?Collection: Heart
The biggest difference would be made if we don't have wars to begin with.Collection: War
I just think the reassurance and the steadiness and the hands-on kindness can make a huge difference.Collection: Kindness
We have evolved to understand that language of power that's taken too much.Collection: Taken
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.Collection: Support You
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: War
I think the music was speaking to that opening up of whose voice gets heard and how multidimensional that voice can be.Collection: Thinking
I really lucked out with that song ["As Cool As I Am"]. Men were becoming much more comfortable with all the different facets and parts of their identity, including their gentler, funnier, sillier, nurturing parts. They started showing up. There was so much exploration of gender at that time. Women were showing up with the range of ways of being female in the world and men were showing up with the range of being male in the world.Collection: Song
A lot of men were also becoming more attuned and less afraid of women [in the nineties ].Collection: Men
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.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Feelings
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 .Collection: Feet