33 rebellions per minute
"Push on into that mystery, and it'll push right back"
2000
Dar Williams, THE GREEN WORLD
THE GREEN WORLD sees Dar Williams writing, for the first time, as a clearly successful person, the loveliest thing ever to grace the finances of her record label, Razor and Tie. She's toured extensively with Richard Thompson and with Richard Shindell; she's played a large number of folk festivals; and she's also benefitted from extensive word of mouth and of mixtape (she's not the artist _I've_ converted the most friends to fandom of, but every friend I've converted has made their own converts in turn). As of January 2001, GREEN WORLD has sold around 200,000 copies, and if that's about 2% of the sales of Jewel's PIECES OF YOU, it's spectacular for a folkie who's failed to hit commercial radio and refused to turn into a mannequin.
In making a record with time and funding and guranteed audience, Dar has managed to make some of her old fans feel severely let down. The official complaint is that it is, under the manipulation of one Stuart Lerman, too "produced". I doubt that's the issue (see below), but I'll grant: there are no solo-with-guitar songs here, not one. Rob Hyman (ex-Hooters) on organ and mellotron, and Graham Maby on bass, are notably expensive studio musicians. The overall production reminds me of John Leventhal's on Shawn Colvin's A FEW SMALL REPAIRS (the one with "Sunny Came Home"), or of the earlier Richard Shindell CD's. "Playing To The Firmament" opens the album with a rousing pump organ hook, and plays like a severely westernized Celtic reel. "And A God Descended" follows with percussion loops and a piano hook like a subtler variation on Semisonic's "Closing Time". "After All" features a distant bass drum like a muffled cannon, some thicker near-heartbeat rumbling, and sustained organ notes. Two songs later, "Spring Street" is actually based on its Hammond organ and its drum tracks, which sound like a computer whispering tambourine and beatbox noises to itself for comfort; the guitar's appearance is brief, fedback, and slightly detuned, while the chorus has only Dar's extended key-switching flutter on the last syllable ("Tiiii-i-i-i-iii-i-ime") to drag it out of "Boys Of Summer" territory. "We Learned The Sea" starts out in the barely-decorated tradition of HONESTY ROOM's "the Great Unknown", but even it builds to chamber strings, while the glistening folk-rock of "I Won't Be Your Yoko Oko" almost reshapes the chorus of "Always Something There To Remind Me" into a jaunty guitar hook. The last four songs are much more restrained -- on the shimmering "It Happens Every Day", I even realize of a sudden how much her guitar-playing and tunes owe to John Denver, not his cover of "Thank God I'm A Country Boy" but his elegant melancholia, so lovingly covered by bands like the Innocence Mission and the Red House Painters. But even the banjo-strumming singalong closer, "Another Mystery", finds room for drums, accordian, and mellotron. All true.
The problem with this as a complaint is this: Dar's clear, supple singing voice remains up front, as ever gushing syllables at triple the pop normal speed; and her melodies, ever winding among major and minor keys, remain as ambitious and instantly identifiable as Elvis Costello's or Scott Miller's. The drums on "...Mystery" are unnecessary, but in my opinion also irrelevant; Graham Maby is an expensive bass player, but a thoroughly unobtrusive one. The only two reasons I can see for rejecting this album as "too produced" are (1) you despise mellotrons and pump organs, which would put a damper on several tracks, or (2) the only Dar album you _really_ liked was HONESTY ROOM, and you'd been programming out half of the last two CD's. However...
It took me four listens to decide that I liked THE GREEN WORLD, and it took me until now, six months after its release, to decide I love it as much as I love its predecessors. There is a real difference here, much larger than the consistent use of sonic wallpaper, and the difference is what songs are _not_ here. No joke songs, by which I mean songs where her serious points are less important than the glee with which she disguises them: no "Alleluhia" or "Flinty Kind of Woman", no "Pointless Yet Poignant Crisis Of A Co-Ed". Furthermore, no jokes in her teaching songs. "What Do You Hear In These Sounds" was one of the most insightful and uplifting songs she's ever written, but also among her funniest, with ridiculous rhymes; "As Cool As I Am"'s dialogue had amusing moments; "Teenagers, Kick Our Butts" had, at least, a wild informality.
The change is that Dar has clearly accepted the role I suggested for her, representing sanity. She is thus cast in opposition. We are, after all, a democratic society that accepts that our main course of life is to waste half of our waking hours commuting to and from jobs where we make and sell devices which will help us to travel and to save time. We accept that our discourse and our art will be sponsored by messengers who promise that if we give even more time to work, and more money to conveniences, we will have more time and money to enjoy discourse and art. "...Firmament" opens GREEN WORLD asking "When did you cave to this role that you were cast in? When did dressup turn to fashion?"; "I just can't seem to find the soul in all this striving". The solutions she offers could be seen as grab-bag: the willful childlikeness of "throw your gown up and down", the more involved creative effort of "dip your brush into the twilight", the defiant indifference of "It's only rain, it's only slowing down a workday", and the submission of "Let it take you apart to the elements of praying". But their link is as a package in which Dar asks you to withdraw for a while, to cut away the clamor of the messages that brought us into this fix. If insanity is social, the first step to a cure is solitude. And when the core of the insanity is the need to be surrounded by messages promoting it, then she clearly feels a need to pack her messages in as swiftly as possible.
Thus topics and koans are crammed together as thick as the packaging allows. "On a bad day, who would you kill?" is provocative taken alone, as a non-rhetorical question, even without the rest of "...Firmament" for it to modify. I don't even know what the album's opening line, "There are kids, lots of kids, would put the law inside a circle", means, and the next 48 minutes certainly give no mental room to consider it. "Take a stand" is the last line before "...Descended", a song about the coming of judgment day: a cultist admits that his belief can't let him doubt that the God of salvation should require destruction, a belief the song's scenario allows to be correct. "We burned our books and beds, we feared we lost the fire" evokes jarring Nazi imagery in an opposition to disgraceful apathy where either way he "has to live with what we did, with what we saw".
The third song, or third step?, is ready for social interaction ("Go ahead, push your luck, find out how much love the world can hold"), and allows that being influenced by the world is, once you've got your bearings, important and necessary. At first I was disgusted by her use of the line "it's better to have fallen in love than never to have fallen at all", and by the awareness that in a year or two, enough ahistoricity will have creeped in that this line will be showing up in AOL profiles attributed as a Dar original. From there I moved on to realizing that since I've never seen the line so elegantly set up as this song's context does, she probably deserved as much credit as the author; and from _there_ I realized that she is the author. Unlike the cliche, with its "loved and lost/ never have loved" pairing, she is inserting the "falling in love" and emphasizing the falling. The elements of praying are hard at first, but they do give you the control to become yourself. Love, lost or kept, spends that control, which is why it shouldn't be the first step. "What Do You Love More Than Love?", next, is the album's one real rocker -- think of 1980 Mellencamp/Petty singing the cadence of a talking blues, or of Melissa Ferrick's "Happy Song" -- and I've just now noticed that it pretty much makes the same links that my last two paragraphs do, isolation as the necessary step getting you from desire ("I found that my love was another addiction") to actual love and giving. What a communist. (Amy X Neuberg fans can dig how the opening verse is the same scenario as in "My Empire". But where Amy's tycoon saw ugly buildings set against lovely mountains as a vengeful nyaa-nyaa against people who were mean to him, Dar's offers the ugly buildings in a misguided display of achievement, to get "the mountain to love him back").
The rest of the songs continue to introduce several new topics each (even "What..." drags in Buddhism). From the use of moving geographically as a means of psychological escape, to Yoko Ono's submergence of her art into collaboration out of love; from obedience of the law, to the conversion of observed moments into journals and from thence into lessons; every human impulse she sees or feels is questioned, brought up for a look. Nature is no longer a setting, but our independent equal: "I promised the fields I'd return from now on". Anthemic lines do float regularly into clear view, though: "I am resolved to being born and so resigned to bravery", "It's all of us versus all that paper". Her final song is about the desire to be known, and she proves it: she packs in every lesson she can think of. It's deprogramming, and it can be exhausting. This isn't an album where she's _able_ to blend major and minor key, it's an album where, until the last two songs, she insists on it.
Luckily, it's very pretty deprogramming, in a way that's understated, drummer or no. And she's almost always insightful, or no worse than provocative. I disliked the album at first because it's discomforting when someone answers a simply phrased question by thinking aloud from eleven angles -- which, ironically, is the #1 reason why _I_ am bad at first dates. But "you never get a second chance to make a first impression" is itself a slogan of our economy of false convenience. You can give someone the third and fifth chance. You can insist to yourself that your first impression is "I don't know yet", or discard it later as a symptom of the problem. We're used to disguise, and we're used to fashion, and we're used to crime being clean and to preferring it that way. Ideas that don't make sense until you hear them ten times are at a huge disadvantage, because even the audience giving you the ten chances to say it are passing three hundred Pepsi billboards while you talk. But if the idea simply _does not yield_ an expression that isn't a puzzle, then I guess there'd better be someone confident enough to puzzle us. Dar has word of mouth and 200,000 fans to keep her faith up. So far, it looks like GREEN WORLD won't hurt that.
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