Dar Williams Travels in Two Worlds by Philip Van Vleck The title of Dar Williams' latest album, The Green World, comes from a notion she gleaned from a Shakespeare class she took while attending Wesleyan University. The idea is that the conflict in Shakespeare's plays is often built on the tension between the "closed world" and the "green world."

"The closed world represented court life in Elizabethan England, which set all the patterns of the day," Williams explained. "It was the orderly part of life. The green world was different. It was unpredictable and chaotic. It was an unmediated place literally represented by the forest, the wilderness, where you learned things you don't necessarily want to know about yourself. Then you would bring the lessons you learned back to the closed world, ultimately spurring the process by which civilization changes. In that respect, the closed world can only renew itself and grow with the green world's influence."

"I'm really glad I named it The Green World," she said. "The album fulfills the title. I think the most important line from a song on the album is, 'It's better to have fallen in love than never to have fallen at all.' The falling was the important part; it was really good for me. I totally exploded my moral structure, all my moral expectations of who I was and what I do. That's the green world — the chaotic space where you learn things about yourself you didn't expect to learn.

"And I think theater and art in general are green worlds," she added. "They're like portable green worlds that we bring into the closed world to watch ourselves and see if there's opportunity or reason for this or that transformation. A lot of my songs are about people coming back from chaotic spaces or going into them."

Dar Williams travels in both worlds. She has released four albums for the New York-based label Razor & Tie since 1994: The Honesty Room (1994), Mortal City (1996), End of Summer (1997) and The Green World (2000). She has matured as a lyricist and musician with every album, reaping her share of critical praise and registering impressive sales. And with every release she has become more bold and more acute as a songwriter, coaxing more edge from her music rather than playing it safe. With each new album Williams has seen more of the green world and brought more of it back to us.

Spin magazine's review of The Green World (October 2000) noted that Williams "approaches life with the vivacity of an Ivy League freshman —clinging to that moment when suburban blankness gets drunk on Great Art and runs naked through the lacrosse fields." Well, something like that has been happening with increasing frequency as one Dar Williams album succeeds the next.

Life hasn't always been a metaphorical streaking episode from sideline to sideline for Williams. She grew up in the bucolic setting of Chappaqua, New York, a Big Apple commuter suburb, the youngest of three sisters. "I began picking up on music as a kid," Williams recalled. "Both my parents have some musical talent. My dad used to sing in the chorus at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, you know, in those huge Wagner choruses. I can't remember if he had to pay two dollars or if they paid him two dollars to do that, but he loved it. And when I was a kid I caught my mom singing along with 'Kiss Me Kate' when she was painting the front hall."

She enjoyed a middle-class, suburban life as a child, no doubt animated by a more rarified intellectual subtext. The mom who was singing along with "Kiss Me Kate" while painting the front hall has a degree from Vassar. Williams' father was an audio/visual editor, working on educational materials for schools, and an art historian, with a degree from Yale. "I started taking clarinet when I was nine years old," Williams explained. "The clarinet lasted about two months, and then my mother asked me if I wanted to play guitar like my sister Julie. I found myself saying yes; I was really quite in awe of Julie.

"I put the guitar away from ages 12 through 17," she continued. "I was doing other things, you know, sports, chorus, schoolwork. After it had been in the closet for about two years, I just assumed that I'd stopped knowing how to play it. So when I took it out again, it was really great to discover that that wasn't true at all. I was amazed that I still knew everything. I don't know exactly why I took the guitar out of the closet. I didn't have any professional aspirations. At the time I was into classical music, and I loved playwriting and theater. I didn't know if I should put the guitar in the attic or keep it around."

This is an excerpt from issue #94.