A Conversation with Dar Williams – HuffPost 9.9.11

Mike Ragogna: Dar, you’re touring with Joan Osborne. How did that come together?

Dar Williams: To be honest, there’s an ongoing list of people that are brought up at the round table when we’re discussing artists to tour with. Usually, it’s someone of the opposite sex, like when I toured with Joshua Radin in 2009–I came up through a lot of coffee houses and live performances, and he came up through a lot of popularity through songs that he had in TV shows like Scrubs and Grey’s Anatomy. He was coming from LA and I was out of New York, he’s male and I’m female, so it really was us bringing two different worlds together. Joan and I have a lot more in common, but I was actually kind of relieved by that. The audiences are in for a lot of adventure when you can make a show work and Joan and I just have so much common ground–she’s from Brooklyn, and I’m from the Brooklyn of Northern New York, about an hour away from New York City. (laughs) We cover a lot of the same territory. We’ve already spoken a couple of times about how we’re going to proceed and if we want to play together, which I think we do. I don’t know about her, but for me it was an instant green light when they mentioned her name amongst others.

MR: How will the performances be set up on the tour?

DW: It’s evenly split–I’m going to be closing some shows and she’ll be closing some shows. We’re gonna work the arch of the evening a little differently every night. The plan is to find points of intersection, either in our styles or in the actual performance.

MR: And you will, as you mentioned, be playing some songs together, is that right?

DW: That’s the plan. We’re both busy gals. (laughs) But I think we’re going to get it together and play a few things together.

MR: Was there a plan when booking the tour’s locations?

DW: No, but I was still very relieved when I saw the layout. The places that were chosen were great. There are a few places where she has a great following, but there are also places where I play all the time that I consider my stomping grounds. They put the two together very well. There are also some places that I’ve seen her posters during one of my shows and realized that I was coming through on the heels of one of her tours. So, we share a lot of common ground. Generally, I think this was probably one of the easier shows for our booking agents to put together because there was very little doubt regarding the places we’d be playing.

MR: This is one of your shorter tours, only lasting about two weeks. But generally, when you’re on tour, do you find that there are a lot of surprises, like special performances or radio and television interviews?

DW: Stuff pops up for sure, and most of the time, everyone gives me a lot of cushioning about whatever it is. They make it sound really enticing in the hopes that I’ll be excited about it. (laughs) And I say yes to all of those kinds of things when they show up. It’s always this feeling of my people throwing stuff out there and seeing what comes up while we’re on the road. It all kind of works like a boomerang, so you’re bound to do some rerouting and changing of plans. There’s a lot of electricity about being on the road and having surprises like that pop up.

MR: Right. Now, you’ve always been internet savvy as an artist, and in today’s music industry, that’s such an important element of becoming successful. Are there newer technologies that you have come to use and rely on recently? Are you doing any live simulcasts or podcasts of your shows?

DW: That’s a really good question, Mike, and I think my team should sign you up for the job. (laughs) A friend of mine was talking to me about his career recently, and I was giving him tons of advice on the things that he should do. But I was talking to a manager recently and he has a pretty high profile artist who was giving him a hard time about the fact that he wasn’t doing certain email blasts and podcasts. I thought it was really interesting that we can talk ourselves into a best case scenario virtual presence and I am both open to that, and don’t fault the people who don’t have time to get and keep the viral publicity going. At the end of the day, someone writes a song, people listen to it, they tell other people about it, and that’s how a song becomes popular. The internet has been pushing stuff forward, but in the end, it’s all the same river. It’s about people listening to music, and hearing about it through the grapevine, and blasting music in a dorm hall or at summer camp. I recently did a show at a summer camp for a bunch of little girls that were so excited after the show that they were telling me they couldn’t wait to tell their friends about my music. (laughs) So, at the end of the day, it’s still about people calling each other on the phone and telling them about the great song they just heard, which is what music should be–to the beat of the heart. I don’t know what’s going to happen with all of that on this tour. I guess Joan and I will have one of those discussions soon to pressure our management into getting that together, because those kinds of things are always fun to get together, especially when you’re playing with an artist that you’ve never played with before. At the same time, I’m just holding on to an old school hope that we can create some magic onstage together because some of the best moments I’ve had onstage in my career have been with other artists.

MR: Do you still play concerts in smaller venues?

DW: Yes, from time to time. Sometimes people ask me to do certain venues, and I tell them to come up with a great fundraiser to support a cause in your community that I can kind of dig in to and I’ll play the show. I like to show up for good things getting better, you know? I’ll also sometimes play a house concert for a radio station or something and it’s as fun as can be. So, I still enjoy playing some of the smaller venues. In fact, sometimes I like playing those shows a little better than others as opposed to when I was first starting and I was a little more self-conscious about my music, because you always have the people who mean well asking why you aren’t doing music that sounds more like “so-and-so.” But now I can say that this is who I am and I have a little bit more of a known identity. It’s more fun than ever for me to just be who I am in a really small space.

MR: Recently, the US Government opened up grants for a number of new low powered radio stations to get Governmental funding. I know that you are an advocate for many green initiatives, solar power–how we power up KRUU–and sustainable living, so are you aware of the strides being made in those areas?

DW: I have not been seeing too many things popping up recently. It’s kind of like solar energy in that the availability is there before the application, you know? I came across a small radio station out of Poughkeepsie, New York, that I had never encountered before and I thought to myself, “I think that this is a beneficiary of whatever grants and green initiatives that are being implemented by the Government,” because these steps that are being taken are a big win for more eco-friendly power and living. However, I don’t see too many people taking advantage of it yet.

MR: True. I feel as though people aren’t taking advantage of these opportunities because their thought is that they could always just use the internet for “radio,” you know?

DW: I think you’re right, and I think it’s very exciting that we have so many of those kinds of transmissions going on. But it’s like getting younger people to run for office; we have to help them realize that it’s not that scary–the doors are wide open. (laughs) You can do this, you know? It’s not that hard for you to get this permit and fill out this paperwork, and get mics and start interviewing people. Yes YOU, 21 year-old who complains about how there isn’t anything to listen to on the radio! This is your opportunity!

MR: (laughs) Yeah, that’s right, and you can hear such an eclectic variety of things on community stations. That’s the beauty of a smaller low-powered station.

DW: Absolutely. I have a song called, “Are You Out There?” which was inspired by listening to WBAI, which is a radical left wing radio station out of New York City. They were talking about all of these different ways of looking at things–they were questioning the Government, etc. But that open format, and the diversity of shows and genres allows that 16-year-old insomniac who doesn’t quite know what their place is yet to hear some really awesome jazz or Celtic music for the first time. It shows them that there’s an incredible range of music and that one of them could be what they’re doing for the entire rest of their lives. I’ve met several young musicians who are from, maybe like, New Jersey and they’re Alt Country artists because of some Alt Country show that they heard on the radio, you know? So, the worlds that stations like these can open up are amazing. We may gain the next slide guitar virtuoso from someone making that door ajar through their small diverse radio station. I even remember hearing science fiction and poetry on various radio stations and that opened up the world for me. You want to open up as many doors for people as possible so they can understand that there are so many opportunities out there as opposed to feeling like there are only 40 songs in the world at the time.

MR: It’s really a time when radio has to re-evaluate itself, you know? Everything can’t be like Clear Channel.

DW: No, and the big stations do have their place. There was a time when I would go into a Starbucks and see a promotion that suggested new artists to customers–artists like me. Now, it’s turned into a more monolithic pattern featuring already established artists like Sheryl Crow or Nora Jones. Beyond that, there are the radio stations that are doing the very same thing. The focus has turned to big stage shows with high energy, great production value, and choregreophy, making everything LARGE, LARGE LARGE. That really has it’s own place in the “Pop-mosphere,” and I don’t have anything against that, it just makes it all the more important for the more intimate songs of artists to be heard elsewhere because the big stuff isn’t really taking chances these days. You don’t hear a big station taking risks in their material, they just play the big, splashy, blockiest thing, and they connect with other big venues and these cross pollinations happen at that very large level. All of that makes it even more important for those coffee house and tip jar gigs to be heard. Artists also need to rise culturally, and not merely in the vein of creating the biggest, splashiest entertainment.

MR: Nicely put, Dar. Hey, have you and Joan started practicing together for the tour yet?

DW: Well, we’ve both been working on finishing albums, so thus far, it’s mostly been writing back and forth about when we can get together and loading our iPods with each other’s music to try to figure out where our comfort zone is. She’s got some songs that I’ve already told her I want to sing on. (laughs) Through this entire process I’ve been hoping she doesn’t think I’m presumptuous for wanting to do that. (laughs) But until recently, we haven’t really had time to sit down together with our guitars.

MR: Nice. Can you tell us some of the cities that you’ll be visiting?

DW: We start in Eugene, and it ends in Bloomington, Indiana. We’re going down the West Coast, coming up through the Southwest, and going through the Midwest. We’ll also be playing at the Turner Ballroom in Milwaukee, which I am really looking forward to, and at Park West in Chicago. So, we have some really great venues lined up.

MR: Awesome. Dar, thank you so much for visiting with us and I hope you’ll come back and join us again soon.

DW: Thank you so much, Mike. It was my pleasure.

Transcribed by Evan Martin