"I don't know what he meant to me, I just know he affected me"
As you get older, the meaning of songs becomes not about the lyrics which as a teenager you transcribe onto scraps of paper or post in your blog, but about who you listened to the music with and who first played a song for you and all the other associations it stirs up with people you once knew, people you hurt or lost contact with, some you rebuilt bridges with, and hopefully some you’ve never lost.
So for me now, Slumber Party and Dead Milkmen always mean Jill. With my former uni friend Rebecca, it’s Lou Reed and Tom Waits because the only two albums we had in common were incongruously 2 from the early 70s, Transformer and The Heart of Saturday Night. Nena ordered me to go see Sage Francis, before her sadness became too much to handle. All the punk and ska bands with Roger. Playing Cristina to Scott and being met with incomprehension around the time I realised we’d outgrown our childhood friendship, notwithstanding gangsta rap and Was (Not Was). It also applies to films, from But I’m A Cheerleader to every Pedro Almodovar. And I hope for other people, some things bring memories of me that aren’t all bad.
The same holds true more recently. With B I guess it’s pretty much every Canadian art-rocker except for some reason the Hidden Cameras. And with R, especially, it’s Dar Williams, who she first pointed out to me and put tracks on compilations, and even though by and large I can take or leave the female singer-songwriter genre, there’s something very special about Dar. Even though R is unimpressed with me now and my late attempt at reconciliation was shitty.
So when I heard Dar Williams was playing Edinburgh in a tiny venue next to a place with excellent cocktails, I knew I had to go but nearly didn’t. And actually I never had a cocktail.
Time seemed to be weighing on Dar’s mind too. It’s the 20th anniversary of her debut album The Honesty Room, although I didn’t hear it till long after 1994. She was reflecting on some of her old songs. She said how Mark Rothko Song was about looking at one of his paintings and feeling so sad, as you do when you’re young, but no painting made her feel like that now. A newer song, Buzzer, was about the Milgram experiment with the electric shocks, and she was saying how when she was 18 if she’d written a song it would be about how she was so cool and wouldn’t get taken in by the fascist experimentalist, but now she was older she was able to take a different perspective.
I’d entirely forgotten about The Babysitter’s Here. She played a few bars of the introduction, then stopped to let an audience member cough, and told an anecdote about coughing, and then the song started. It’s the perfect mix of innocence and a darker sadder feeling; not exactly Blake’s innocence and experience, because nobody is Blake and that sort of reference makes me think of Jim Morrison and ridiculous hippy/druggies. But that mixture is the heart of her music, and it’s mirrored by the way her voice switches from conversational to high and pure, and back again, which isn’t an original trick for female singer songwriters but with her both registers sound good not shrill or dull. And time and again she moves from funny to heartbreakingly sad, thanks to her gift for observation and hitting the deep truth.
I wasn’t as familiar with her more recent stuff. There was a track, I Am The One Who Will Remember Everything, from her 2012 album of songs inspired by Greek myth. She’d recorded a song for a Pete Seeger tribute album last year, when he was still alive and strong and 94, so that became a tribute. Iowa brought an anecdote about her lesbian following; The Ocean about playing to a roomful of heroin addicts. She was saying Iowa was much hillier than she expected, which I found to be the case with Missouri. There was just the right amount of talking between songs, telling you interesting things about the song without keeping you waiting too long.
Support was Melojian, a Northern Irish folky two-piece: they seemed very serious and earnest at first, with the singer a bit Matt Cardle-ish with a shit hat, and I’m not sure if I’d seen them before or if every up-and-coming folk singer dresses the same. But soon it got more silly. One song, being as the singer’s a Northern Irish Catholic, was about being in mass and paramilitary gunmen bursting in to kill all the Catholics, and him saving the communion girls with his karate skillz. A good support band, though not sure I’d pay actual money to see them.
They rejoined her towards the end of her set, and covered Nilsson’s Everybody’s Talking and another song.
She played for 90 minutes but it felt much shorter. Things drew towards a conclusion with When I Was A Boy, album 1 track 1, which remains a great song: again innocence and experience. And she finished with February, which is about forgetting what flowers are, which is a little silly, but I’ll let it pass.
