| "Mortal City" by Dar Williams |
[May. 16th, 2008|11:14 am] |
This was the first artist since Jethro Tull in this project who I've listened to before. This was the first artist in the project who I've seen perform live. So some of the songs on "Mortal City" were not new to me, and that made this a very different experience. Not a discovery experience but a deepening experience. Equally interesting, I think.
Dar Williams has some tools in her bag that few musicians do. She has an uncanny ability to create surprising phrases. A willingness to stretch a piece out past its breaking point to see what happens, without losing the awareness that she is stretching it too far. A deeply piercing, poignant voice that can also laugh- in the most heartbreaking ways. And most of all a refusal to simplify.
"The Christians and the Pagans" could be cheesy or saccharine, but it's not. Why not? Because she doesn't wrap the ending up in a bow. She lets it stay messy. The most shocking words in the song are 'the best that they are able.' Williams hands us a victory, but it's only a partial one. And her shrill voice, with its tearful laughter over the lines "When Christians eat with Pagans only pumpkin pies are burning", always makes me cry. I cry with delight and frustration, mixed together.
Then there are, in "February", exchanges like "He said it's a crocus- I said what's a crocus- He said it's flower. I tried to remember, but I said what's a flower- he said I still love you." The patter is perfect, the moment sublime: Suddenly, a harmless conversation takes a completely serious twist, with delightful result. Yet the song has been carefully developing an extended metaphor about the coming of spring and within that metaphor the entire conversation was serious, and the final line the deviation, the place where the metaphor broke down and came into contact with the actuality. Again, the refusal to simplify. Lyrics that eat at you with their incisiveness and subtlety, until you come to an understanding.
Or "As Cool As I Am", the clear highlight of the album. She begins by saying she's "running out of time and one-liners", but if she may be running out of the former, she's certainly not near the end of the latter. The whole song is one clever line after the next, yet they fit together into a coherent story and a coherent idea- self-assertion is more than just a defense mechanism, it's a way of life.
So to give some of those lyrics the attention they deserve... Let's start with "And I could teach her how I learned to dance when the music's ended." Like the crocus lyric, this is a line that functions within and without the extended metaphor of the song. Of course, this is a subtler song than "Feburary" and the lines between the two blur much more. But we have this image of a woman on a dance floor, who catches the singer and her lover's eyes because of the power of her dance. And the singer ascribes it to "loneliness, suspended to our own by grappling hooks." She is dancing out of desperation, clinging to the music and to the people to fight a loneliness she cannot shed, to reach and independence she cannot find. And within the metaphor of the song, dancing when the music's ended is about finding a life after a break-up. The singer is promising to teach the hard-earned secrets of surviving independently. But the image isn't just metaphor. The singer's lover is a creep who flirts with any girl they see, and the singer is directly telling them that the things they do are just taking advantage of others desperate loneliness. And you will notice that I purposefully used the 'singular they', because I find 'ze' silly but the lover in this song is carefully and defiantly ungendered. Which is a statement made more powerful by the fact that everyone else in the song is strongly identified as a woman, especially in the chorus's promise "I will not be afraid of women." This could be a song about a male predator in a world of women. Or it could be a song about a female predator in a world of women. It doesn't matter. She's not that petty.
"And then I walked outside to join the others- I am the others." The ultimate triumph of this song is just to walk away alive from the manipulative relationship, and become another of the anonymous women of the song. And yet it's completely triumphant, in a way no other song on the album is. Williams is unambiguous here- she has won the fight.
"The Blessings" is a strange song, but I think I like it, though it sounds a little too much like Morrisette's "Ironic". Williams's lyrics are more interesting, though, as usual. I'm not totally sure, but I think it's about perspective. How you never get a good perspective until it's too late, yet even too late, finding that wider perspective is still a blessing. We grow into wisdom, slowly.
And lastly, the song's title track "Mortal City", which I didn't like the first time I heard and liked a huge amount the second and will continue to waver on. It's about the two ways to look at the bigness and anonymity of the City. One is to become overwhelmed by it and feel lonely. The other is to sense your place amidst the crowd and feel connected by a sense of shared community. I switched between those two modes at various times when I lived in NYC. I really understand what the song is getting at. So why didn't I like it? Because the melodrama is pitched way too high. You don't need a catastrophic icestorm to make you realize the double-edged sword that is the Mortal City. So sometimes I cringe at Williams's over-the-top antics and sometimes I just feel deeply the core of the message- that as long as you can hear the sounds of the City around you, you need never think of it as a Mortal City but always as a Living City. |
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