6 minute read
Coffee & Creativity
Coffee &Coffee &CreativityCreativity
Dar Williams’s stop at Skowhegan opera House on December 14 is part of a long chat she’s having with maine.
IntERvIEW By colIn SARgEnt
Producer Brad Wood has described your new songs on Promised Land as the result of a “career change.” Here in Maine, at “Ever After Mustang Rescue,” when a rescued desert mustang who’s spent his life outdoors is guided into a big dark riding arena for the first time, he actually shivers from the change. Is it like that?
Brad has definitely gone with… people who have this really clear pop sound. He worked with the Bangles. I love the Bangles, and they loved him, so it means he’d worked out his mommy issues.
So the fact that he has a good social reputation was important. He works well with women and creates a beautiful sound. He has real vision. He adds these little
subtle glimmers here and there. What you also hear is the listening. Another difference is that it’s a more keyboard-driven album. But I did not shiver.
Can you tell us about the first time you ever came to Maine?
I was four or five. My aunt told me about how sailors put salt water on their wounds to help them heal more quickly.
In your new CD Promised Land [Razor & Tie, $18.97], you use silence almost as though it’s a musical instrument.
I grew up in a theater background, so there’s narrative background in the kind of storytelling I do. Silence goes hand in hand with [a dramatic presentation], like beats in dialogue.
Sting, who other performers list as an influence along with you, refers to his hometown of Newcastle in Northern England as ‘edge of the Empire.’ Is there something edge of empire about Maine that draws you here?
Yes, I’ve come to Maine a ton of times. I feel that sense of beyond the edge there. I like the very craggy–in places, otherworldly–coastline. It influences my song “The Oceans.” When I was finishing the song I was just north of Freeport. We’d been to L.L. Bean and then headed out to where we were going to stay. It was the New Year, and the hotel was really on an isolated spit. When we drove up, it was so creepy we headed out to another hotel. We just turned the car around.
There’s a Spring Street in Portland, where Cumberland County Civic Center’s located. Does that remind you of your song of the same title?
Usually the equivalents of Spring Street in SoHo I find are called Michigan Avenue or Rodeo Drive. “Spring Street” goes to a specific set of circumstances. I always smile when I see a Spring Street; I feel lucky.
I know Spring Street in Portland; I’ve spent a lot of time in Portland. We have friends in Rockland and close to Bangor. I went up to the Common Ground [Fair] a few years ago, so I think of Maine as sort of leading the country on a lot of farming and food issues. There’s this sense of, “we’ve got blueberries, we don’t need to import them from 6,000 miles away.” There’s a lot of smart thinking about how to go into the 21st century.
I associate Maine with its completely beautiful, dramatic landscape and the intelligent audiences there, because they’re very smart. I see Maine as quietly making the most of its distances from other places. There’s poetic distance from the East Coast metropolis.
It’s funny–I remember the most creative kids in college I knew came from small towns in Maine. Across the board. It was, “see that kid doing the neat performance piece? Guess where that person’s from? Maine!”
I’ve commuted to islands in Maine to go swimming and hiked around old graveyards. I used to go to the coop that got eaten by Whole Foods…then there’s the beautiful restaurant Fore Street.
I’m sure the drive up to Stone Mountain [Arts Center in Brownfield, Maine], which is Carol Noonan’s place, has inspired me plenty. I just love the friends we have in Maine and how they think. They’ll say something like, ‘See, look, they have a pig behind the restaurant. They keep the pig to eat the compost behind the restaurant. Then they eat the pig.’
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What are the 30 most embarrassing seconds you’ve spent in front of a microphone?
Recently, I was trapped backstage and couldn’t go to the tour bus or put on any nice clothes. I was going to go out to sing with Shawn Mullins, who’s been opening the tour, on the stage in L.A. I looked pretty unstageworthy. It reminded me of when I was stung by a bee on my lip in sixth grade. The lip just blew up. My science teacher called me brave. In this kind of music, you just make the best of it and move on.
How do you know when you’re ‘in the zone’ creatively? Artist Dozier Bell has copped to eating kit-kat bars.
After reading The Artist’s Way [by Julia Cameron], I really love having high art and low art in my life. I love walking around big airy contemporary art spaces and seeing how they fit in with my own creative associations–high art. Then I’ll sneak into a movie and watch a classic chick flick in the afternoon, and somehow that loosens my pressure about what is great art. I totally love chick flicks. You don’t have to write the great American novel every day. Just telling a story you like is going to work out. I love the marriage of creativity and coffee.
Joni Mitchell has always had one foot in jazz, but she’s gone even more into that direction. You’re headed someplace sunnier and again, up-tempo but somehow still lyrical. Where are you going?
I’ve always wanted to be simpler. I’ve wanted to say the most of the least. With Joni, it’s new musical frontiers; for me it’s always a narrative frontier. At the first level of telling a story it was, ‘I had to leave my boyfriend because I heard a mysterious voice in my head. Then this happened and that happened.’ When you’re young, you have a need to tell all these ancillary things. When you’re older, you strip it down: I had to go because people change. Then people believe you. They’re not trying to fit your story into things they’ve read—they fit it into their own understanding. Now, there’s less trying to explain myself. I try to find the eternal and not quite expected.
Okay, then, on the reductive, real-simple front: How would you describe your music in three words?
Well loved stories. ■
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