Dar Williams – I’ll Meet You Here
BMG Renew – 1 October 2021
I’ll Meet You Here is Dar Williams’ first album in six years and a label debut. Recorded while juggling pandemic limitations, ‘I’ll Meet You There’ essentially addresses meeting life head-on, accepting what you cannot change and working to change what you can. Featuring Gail Ann Dorsey on bass and Larry Campbell on assorted guitars, it kicks off with the slow and steady Time, Be My Friend, which reflects on the gifts the passing years have brought (“Most of all, a lifetime of friends”), the impatience of wanting to see where the road leads (“Always asked where you were going/Though you had no way of knowing”) of finding light when all seemed dark (“when I thought that I was alone/You snapped your fingers and a tree came into bloom/And the sun came by to fill my room”) and of optimism for what may yet be to come (“You will never say you love me/But let’s see what’s round the bend”).
The rest of the album is founded on her core band of bassist Paul Socolow, drummer Doug Yowell, Bryn Roberts on keys and guitarists Steuart Smith and Stewart Lerman. The buoyant You Give It All Away opens with a Steve Elson’s sax brass, taking a striding rhythm as she again sings of the magic moment and the creative spark (“I know how it feels when the day will give you nothing/Then you see the golden spark that’s floating on the wind/The line becomes the verse becomes/The golden trees, the golden birds”), and perhaps music as a rescue remedy (“Just find a way to send the light you send/Just like salvation might depend upon/The things you do”).
The running thread of good fortune arising amid adversity continues with the chiming melody of Let the Wind Blow (“we saw the cloud of smoke, and we heard the distant cries/But by then it was too late, and we couldn’t turn around/So here comes the fire/We were coughing as we ran, trees fell in the path/But then we saw the rocks, and we climbed till we were free”), returning also to the role of the artist in inspiring those yet to come (“Down a winding garden path there’s a creaky little house/I’ll be writing at my desk, looking out upon my town/So here comes the end, I will close this book tonight/Pass the golden pen along/To the heroes of love, great storytellers all/Let the wind blow, may they find their way home/And watch the sun rise up again”).
Tentative electric piano notes lead into Magical Thinking, a metaphor-fuelled relationship number that, once more seeks light on the horizon, going from (“You say the rock bed is dry, I say the drought has got to give” to “it rained for days and nights on end/It’s like we emptied out the sky/And the creek was running so full, everywhere/You could hear it rushing by”.
Dave Eggar on cello, set around Independence Day celebrations and inspired by events in Beacon, New York, near where she lives, Little Town has a social commentary lens about embracing diversity, sung in the voice of the local bigot telling the newcomers, “It’s nothing that you did, it’s not the color of your skin/ But one thing you should know, you’ve gotta take it slow” while his friend the mayor, welcoming the immigrants as revitalising new blood, hopes he’ll come around, which, by the end of the song and one of them now mayor, he has (“you know that I’m not proud, those things I dared to say out loud/But you wave it all away, my friend, you wave it all away/But my kids, they went off in all directions/And I know it’s thanks to you they have returned”).
Arranged for cello and violins, the smoky sung, mid-tempo swaying literate folk-pop Berkeley nods to the 50s Beat poets, the line “I was the crazed model/For somebody’s novel/Bought from the bookstore where Howl was on trial” a reference to Ginsberg’s controversial poem and San Francisco’s City Lights, owned by the late Lawrence Ferlinghetti who published it, again a snapshot of a time of change (“The old world was fading/The canvas was waiting”), taking a swipe at Reagan and drawing on Jewish imagery as it looks at the brave new world and returns to Howl with “Now it’s commuters/With silver computers/Fed into trains bound for Moloch’s machine”.
Today and Every Day is a jaunty splash of folksy pop positivity about the Thunberg generation’s fight to battle climate change (“Young blood coming up and coming from behind/You know you have the force to change the world”) but a reminder that it’s not just down to them (“There’s no time for this smug frustration, I say everyone, EVERYONE’S a power station/And we’ll light the way/But we got to say we can save the world a little every day”) because “If we don’t go and lay it on the line/What will we tell tomorrow when tomorrow says we had this time?”
Again coloured by Edgar’s cello with Roberts on piano, tinted with shades of early Janis Ian, the quietly gorgeous I Never Knew is a simple awakening to the light of love as a force for self-discovery (“I never knew love would tell me I was worth the fight/I never knew love could hear the wrong and see the right/I never knew I could tell the truth the whole thing/I look up and you’re still listening”) and the illumination of self-worth (“I thought love was hoping that you had enough to give to someone else/No one ever told me I should lift my head and ask for love myself/But it wasn’t a surprise to find I’d told myself a pack of lies/Whenever I’d rush to answer every beck and call/I knew in my heart that wasn’t really love at all”), a reminder that while lovers may leave, love never does.
There’s one non-original here, written by Joziah Longo from Slambovian Circus Of Dreams, Sullivan Lane is, featuring harmonies by Rich Price, Greg Naughton and Brian Chartrand, aka The Sweet Remains, a strummed, mandolin flecked acoustic slow waltz about kindred spirits, ostracised for their mental health, finding connection with each other (“she only noticed the goodness in me”). It ends with Williams turning full career circle, as, her gentle soprano accompanied by just Roberts on piano, she revisits You’re Aging Well, an Ian-styled song that first appeared as a live 1985 recording on Boston Women’s Voice, a compilation of Boston Area Women artists from Cambridge, MA, subsequently recorded for her 1995 official debut, The Honesty Room and sung as a duet with Joan Baez on the latter’s Ring Them Bells live album of the same year, essentially proving her breakout moment.
Given the through-line of the new album, it’s an apposite way to close with its theme of finding your voice through your art (“I’m going to steal out with my paint and brushes,I’ll change the directions”) and making your own changes (“I was all out of choices, but the woman of voices/She turned round the corner with music around her/She gave me the language that keeps me alive, she said, I’m so glad that you finally made it here”). The final words are, “Aren’t we aging well?” Like a fine wine, Williams is indeed a very special vintage that simply gets better and better with time.
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Photo Credit Ebru Yildiz