Dar Williams – HuffPost 6.11.12

Mike Ragogna: What advice do you have for new artists?

Dar Williams: Well, it’s very linked to this positive proximity thing. Find yourself a place where people are making music together. If you believe that you are someone who can go off in a room by yourself and kind of morph the world into a whole new kind of music or you just need to be in a room by yourself and practice and practice and practice and kind of arrive in the world fully hatched, there is precedent for that. But for me, I was part of a scene, and it was great. We dated each other, we fought with each other, we bickered, we talked behind each other’s backs, we were petty! (laughs) It was great because we were also slowly imparting that this works or this doesn’t work in songwriting. And because performance is an element of things, I was told in certain terms to get rid of my yard sale guitar and that I needed to work on my diction, and then it got really specific, and feelings were hurt, and then I grew. It was a wonderful thing, and it was less lonely, and I got to go to a lot of open mics and find myself.