| Dar Williams – Alleluia Lyrics | 18 years ago |
|
Dar Williams: Well, it's autobiographical, but it didn't happen to me. I think it was inspired by a kid who died in a car accident in my high school, who was a real angel... He was high, it was a stolen car, he did wrap it around a tree. He was high a lot, I think, toward the end, and he was the type of guy in health class who you'd call a bad kid, and he clearly was not. And I always wondered if he thought or felt that he was a bad kid who would never go to Heaven... And, uh, I never smoked pot in high school, so I'm very free about the whole thing. I once said, "Mo' better kid to smoke a joint than go to the mall", and got in trouble with lots of teachers and stuff...(laughs) But he was kind of a loose kid, and he was really beloved as this kid who really loved other kids, and at his funeral service, this one friend of his said how he, this dead kid, said, "Do you ever get choked up when your dad says he loves you?" (Laughs) He turned out to be, like, a superangel! And that absolutely changed my life in how I trusted various forms of authority, after the kid who died... So that's to me that song...he's also a very funny kid. Splendid: Oh, were some of the jokes his? Dar Williams: No, although his brother came up to me and said, "You know you got his...there's something in that song where you knew him better than you realized. And, you know, he had a Biology Class beauty contest, and I got second place. That kind of thing. |
|
| Dar Williams – Spring Street Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| "The royalty checks had started coming in, and I thought, `I'm really wealthy,' " she jokes, mocking her own naïveté. "I showed the apartment to somebody and they said, `You're thinking of moving there? You could never afford it!' " But it wouldn't be a Dar Williams song if the thought process stopped there. Williams, who's hyper-analytical of herself and everything around her, realized how close she had come to betraying her authenticity by coveting that SoHo apartment. "The song is scary because, basically, I thought I could replace coolness with the commodity of coolness." When I point out with near-airhead redundancy that SoHo has long symbolized the "commodity of coolness," she pauses for a half-beat of effect. "Well, yeah. That's why I called the song `Spring Street.' Instead of `Dar.' It's about fear of self-commodification." | |
| Dar Williams – Mortal City Lyrics | 18 years ago |
|
"I think that those observations can have a lot of sides to them,'' says Williams. "Looking at the humanity of the situation can have a lot of perspectives and a lot of sides and that can be an interesting song -- how people come together a lot more than we give them credit for in a very mortal context or how various states of emergency come through us in our daily lives and how we united around it, fixing problems. "In fact it was hard to write the song Mortal City because I was going through a pretty anti-urban time and so for me, it was a reconciliation of loving what I experienced in cities.'' |
|
| Dar Williams – Teenagers, Kick Our Butts Lyrics | 18 years ago |
|
``It's sort of an imperative that I wanted to communicate,'' Williams says, laughing again, ``That they should just be their awkward, exploring, really curious selves, and see what they can make of the world . . . and try to get to the stuff that's more raw, that they can really question. I think in the suburbs you encounter people who have an awful lot of power,'' she said, ``and for all that power, there's also a lot of fear. Teenagers are the scapegoats of adults who are afraid of their own power.'' |
|
| Dar Williams – As Cool As I Am Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| "Probably because I grew up with three sisters, I know what it's like to be competitive with women. But one of the great benefits of my generation is that female friendships are much stronger, and we're more savvy about the way the media makes us compete with each other." | |
| Dar Williams – As Cool As I Am Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| "It's about taking a stand against insidious abuses," Dar explains. "A friend of mine, who is envied a lot for her beauty and magnetic personality, went out with someone who was not dynamic at all, who projected a lot of neurosis on to her by talking about other women. I once found myself in the same sort of situation, when a lover was quietly critical of things important to me. It was a hard relationship to get out of." | |
| Dar Williams – Southern California Wants to Be Western New York Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| the last song I wrote is a little on the vague side. It’s called “Southern California wants to be Western New York,” and it’s clever, I think; top-heavy, too filled with little clever-isms and too little lasting value. So I’m afraid I may have to jettison it. I think an audience member has to do too much footwork to keep up with it. To do all that to keep up with a song that, inevitably, is just clever, I think is too much. You’re always concerned about whether you’re compromising yourself, whether you’re honest, whether you’re evolving, if you’re afraid to evolve. So I have the confidence that I don’t really like thinking in clichés, that I prefer to write songs from a place where I have some perspective, some valuable reflection.” | |
| Dar Williams – When I Was a Boy Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| I thought "When I was a boy" would be an enormous flop, because I felt like I was the only one like that growing up in my school. I thought the boys were boys and the girls were girls, and here I was playing sports with the boys and being more grubby than most of the kids. I had no idea I was going to hit a nerve with so many people. I've sung that song for real girly-girls from my past, and they say they can relate to that song. And it really surprised me that it resonated so much with men. Two or three men I had always associated with being very emotionally masked, sort of notoriously so, found me at a quiet moment and said, you know, I was a girl. The ones I knew who were the most emotionally guarded were the ones who made a special point of being very direct with me about how this song had affected them." | |
| Dar Williams – The Pointless, Yet Poignant, Crisis of a Co-Ed Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| "(The main character) is very serious about her involvement in this organization which is all about people finding good excuses to smoke pot. She's kind of blind to the fact that she's the only serious political member, and she's ultra-literal about everything," Williams explains. "I believe that definition of humor; it helps you see how people can take things so seriously." | |
| Dar Williams – If I Wrote You Lyrics | 18 years ago |
|
an interview with dar Q. In the publicity material for this song [If I Wrote You] you said that there is the insinuation that the narrator is clean and sober now. On the album I see that it is dedicated to the memory of Townes Van Zandt. A. It goes either way, but it doesn't work completely for being about Townes Van Zandt. In a sense, he could be the narrator deceiving someone, he was a notorious alcoholic, but beloved. One of the things that the narrator is saying is that we have had a destructive relationship and I had to get away, but another thing the narrator is saying is that you are a completely worth it, wonderful human being. I feel like the narrator is saying, "I'm not going to judge you but I had to get away." Q I have been wondering about the lines, "The truth was the only way out,/ But not the only way." A. That was a line I wrote after I realized that it was an autobiographical song. I didn't think it was, I was just trying to flesh out a certain narrator, and then I realized who it was about. I think that these two people knew that there was only one way to go if they were going to be successful. I watched them get that glint of recognition of which way they should go. I watched that recognition and then I saw a secondary understanding, that given that was the way you should go, you could go a number of other ways and get away with it. It was really helpful to suddenly have a reference point and to be going off a live model instead of an abstract. |
|
| Dar Williams – The End of the Summer Lyrics | 18 years ago |
|
dar says: We called it The End of the Summer because the end of the summer is a time when you take the sticks and leaves out of your hair and put on your shoes and go back to something like school... it's a time when you become more serious. And in a Shakespearrean sense it's when you collect and recollect and harvest...you know, glean important lessons from things. And there's this sort of reluctant coming back into the civilized world quality in a lot of these narratives. |
|
| Dar Williams – The Pointless, Yet Poignant, Crisis of a Co-Ed Lyrics | 18 years ago |
|
dar says Well, I have this song about this couple that's really trying to legalize marijuana, but he just wants to legalize marijuana because he's basically a pothead, and she wants to legalize marijuana because she's this slightly prim, intellectual who is really trying to get down and dirty with the issues and has no clue that he's bedding every other women that's with every other cause on the campus... |
|
| Dar Williams – When I Was a Boy Lyrics | 18 years ago |
|
Dar says: "The feminists are going to say, “Why couldn’t you be that way when you were a girl?” But I wasn’t like a boy, I was a boy. So there was grit to stick to that strong line. I was describing how I was a boy, and then I was trying to decide how to end the song. I thought the song was going to be a whole thing about women in the world, but I realized it’s just not a feminist song. It’s not a song about women, it’s a song about children. So that’s why the ending is “when I was a girl.” And that’s what made all the difference. Because if it was turning into a feminist manifesto, it would have been really heavy. It would have been like that rib that they put on the car in the Flintstones, and the whole car falls over! It would have been that rib. I think there is a lot of empathy between men and women, and they want to share, but they get polarized by these debates. I didn’t want to feel that I was arguing against men, especially since men get shafted so much by their roles. Actually a lot of women that I speak to who would have been the separatists, they feel sorry for men. They don’t feel like men are the enemy, they feel like men are the victims of these roles. |
|
| Dar Williams – I Had No Right Lyrics | 18 years ago |
|
This is an an excerpt from and interview with Dar DW: Do you know anything about the Berrigan Brothers? The Berrigans were, are, one’s still a priest, and the other was a priest. Out of conscious, out of prayer and conscious decided to create their own napalm, and put it on draft files in protest of the war. They burned these draft files and they went to jail for it. There was a trial for it. They called themselves the Catonsville Nine, Catonsville, Maryland, and they went on trial for it for three days and they were sent to jail for three years. They did it out of conscious, and they did it at a time when…Danny Berrigan did go over to Viet Nam, and when he was there they started a bombing campaign that they hadn’t done in six months. It was literally like the country was trying to kill him for his protesting. It was a really heavy time and he took a stand. It’s not as much a song about politics as a song about spiritual choice and spiritual reasoning. To me it was a song about spiritual reckoning as opposed to the politics although the politics of it were very important too in terms of how people took a stand. I actually saw Daniel Berrigan and I was telling him about how there was a book that written by the Presbyterian Church that basically said, “Presbyterian Clergy look at the Viet Nam war…” The first page says, “It’s a very difficult issue. It’s very hard to say what the best action is.” It was a terrible war. It was hard for large establishments to take a stand on it. This was the end of the Sixties. This was a time when a person could weigh in and say, “This isn’t making sense.” It was really poignant and sad to see the Presbyterian Church couldn’t find it in itself to go against the establishment. They went against the establishment in the name of religious belief. It was all too rare in this country to do that. That’s why I wanted to write a song about them. |
|
| Kenny Chesney – Anything But Mine Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| I think this song is about one of those picture perfect summer nights. They are together and everything seems ideal. The wind is warm, theyre at the beach, they think that nothing could ever be better than this moment in time. He knows that he'll be leaving soon, but he is just living in the moment, and in this moment he cant imagine being anywhere else with anyone else, or imagine her being with anyone else either. They go to hear the local band and it just makes the night more perfect, and he tells her he loves her, because in that second everything is beautiful and fabulous and they do laugh, cause they know that there is no love between them, but in that second, it just feels right. | |
| Citizen Cope – Bullet And A Target Lyrics | 19 years ago |
|
Citizen Cope says "Bullet and a target has a lot of different meanings. Well, let me first say the songs kinda create themselves, they feed off themselves and they happen. Anything I say about a song is in retrospect more so than I planned it to be like that; I'm looking at it listening to it now. Part of what "Bullet and a Target" is about is people that put themselves in situations that are dangerous that have a self-destructive quality. Part of it is where society is putting them in that situation. There's people that were born into it, people that choose to do it, and there's people who are thrown into it. "Bullet and a Target" deals with a lot of things." |
|
| The Postal Service – The District Sleeps Alone Tonight Lyrics | 19 years ago |
| I think this song is about trying to rekindle an old flame or visit or talk to someone that you have lost touch with. He meets up with this girl he used to know who lives in DC. He shows up with high hopes of being friends again but he realizes that he really doesnt even know who she is anymore; they have grown apart and she isnt who he remembers her to be, and maybe he remembers her different than she was, or remembers the realtionship to be different than it was in reality. This girl has a new boyfriend, a stranger to the narrator, who has the key to her apartment, and the girl tells hime that he's just visiting, i.e. that he will be gone soon enough. | |
| David Gray – The Other Side Lyrics | 19 years ago |
|
"The lyrics are suggesting that the person singing the song is singing it to someone else who he has been in a relationship with that's broken down," Gray explained. "It's like, 'Meet me on the other side of this' kind of thing. The other side of this turmoil and heartbreak. The power of the lyrics suggests, [however,] 'Meet me on the other side of death.' It's a bit of a call into the void. That's where the song gains its power. And that's what seems to have come out stronger than all the lyrics." "The Other Side" was the last song Gray recorded for the album and was done much more quickly than the others were. His vocals on the album are actually from the first take of the song, when Gray was at his most revealing. "When you catch yourself off guard, you're really blown away," he said. |
|
| David Gray – A Clean Pair Of Eyes Lyrics | 19 years ago |
| It's like that track on the new album, Clean Pair of Blue Eyes. I wrote that at a time when I was down, in New York, with Clune and wondering if I'd ever get a recording deal. Then we went to the Metropolitan Art Museum and it was the kind of day where you feel you're seeing the world for the first time. It was super-real. Then I saw a painting by Vermeer. He was painting with light. It was the most iridescent form of perfection. I couldn't believe it! And that night I started writing Clean Pair of Blue Eyes which I finished in Ireland. That sense of transformation really is what I hope to fire with my music." | |
| David Gray – If Your Love Is Real Lyrics | 19 years ago |
|
questions seep through If Your Love Is Real which is "about someone falling for somebody and some mad, passionate thing that is fantastic, in-and-out of bed, then they're off somewhere else and you're wondering whether it was just a good time for them or if they really feel as deeply as you do." This he considered in terms of his own mother. "My mom and dad had been split up for a couple of years and my mom was about to start seeing another bloke and I remember thinking she seemed really vulnerable and what a big deal this was," he says, quietly. "All she'd been through and then to stake it all on someone else again. The courage you need to do that. Those thoughts also occurred while I was writing the song that opens this album, Flame Turns Blue." |
|
| David Gray – Dead In The Water Lyrics | 19 years ago |
| Gray started singing the words "Dead in the water" and then simply added other ambiguous verses. "It's just sort of mish mash, not to demystify it too much," he said. "It's like my earlier albums in that it's slightly more aggressive, more controversial. I'm not really sure what it's about, but it's got an anti-religious bent to it. It seems to be critical. ... And I like starting the record with it, because it immediately is completely different from White Ladder." | |
| Damien Rice – Older Chests Lyrics | 19 years ago |
| I saw Damien last year and he talkjed about why he wrote this song. Damien wrote this about a crappy apartment his friend had. He was looking at a shelf that was crammed so full with books that it was falling down. The "Older Chests" represent furniture that is cheap and falls apart. It represents our culture's lack of appreciation for things. Then the song goes into how we don't appreciate anything anymore. We own all these things and don't even appreciate what we have: "too many books, read me your favorite line" - we have so many books that we don't even know what they're about or have time to read them. | |
* This information can be up to 15 minutes delayed.