Arts & Entertainment
It Doesn't Happen Every Day
It Doesn't Happen
Every Day
Review by Carolyn Ashby
A packed Ira Allen Chapel was recently treated to a fantastic show by not one, but two, luminaries of the women’s folk music scene. Dar Williams and Catie Curtis opened a tour supporting their brand new CDs in Burlington. The UVM Women’s Center co-sponsored the benefit concert for the Peace & Justice Center. Both artists loaded their sets with new music, slipping in old favorites at the perfect moments.
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Curtis is accompanied only by Jimmy Ryan on mandolin on tour. The Burlington opening is a homecoming of sorts for both: Ryan lived in Burlington for eight years; Curtis played the Burlington Coffeehouse years ago when she still had a day job.
A story and a song, “Slave to my Belly,” got the audience laughing and hooked in. Curtis’ upbringing in Saco, Maine, provided inspiration for several other highlight songs, including one week-old tune that posed questions of faith using the story of a small-town church burned to the ground and stunning images like “pieces of molten Jesus at my feet.” The complex questions and utter simplicity of life are the perennial topics of her songs; the spare folk style of her set, accompanied by rippling mandolin, was the perfect backdrop.
On her new album, A Crash Course in Roses, Curtis opted for a more lush sound with fuller instrumentation. Where past albums paired introspection and emotional reaching out with guitar and subtle back-up, the new bounce on this album amplifies the helping hand and positive perspective in the face of difficulties offered in her lyrics. A more rock-like energy lends different flavor to subtle lyrical pictures. In “World Don’t Owe Me,” she sings “the world don’t owe me a highway, don’t owe me a train, the world don’t owe me an easy way out,” while the music evokes the rhythm of the speeding car or train carrying the pain away.
The image of movement, travel and the corresponding rest of home, both real and within one’s self and relationships, carries throughout. In “Magnolia Street,” a night’s drive with a first love—”I knew that I loved you the first time you got in my car… I felt a hush come over me in the dark”—so changes life that home is “not … the one I’ve known.” Those intimate moments that make up the memories of life sparkle throughout, particularly in “100 Miles” and “Burn Your Own House Down.”
It is these “little struggles, little glories” that she juxtaposes to what she sees in the outside world in “Wise to the Ways.” In Vermont this year, we, too, have recognized “The one that cries out… claiming to be righteous, claiming devout/Saying everything except what it’s about” and the response: “There’s so much coming at us now… If I said what I should say/I would be screaming.”
“What’s the Matter,” with harmony vocals by Melissa Ferrick and Jennifer Kimball, formerly of The Story, is also particularly fitting. Curtis introduced it in concert by informing the audience that she was “very pleased to hear about the civil union legislation.” Based in her own experience, it tells a story familiar to far too many GLBT youth, “This town was my biggest fan/’Til I was who I am.” In a town where “you can see the stars at night,” the question is posed: “Why be afraid of this girl?… Why be afraid of this world?” Conversations around the state probably include answers to fear just like this one: “What if I am Black or Jew/Straight or queer mother of two…. I love this town…. I’ve got something to give.”
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Dar Williams’ onstage presence more closely mirrors the feel of her new album, The Green World. In fact, she played all but one of the songs from that album at the concert. Add to the mix her rollicking “homage to therapy” “What Do You Hear in These Sounds?,” solo renditions of “The Babysitter’s Here,” and same-sex-couple-affirmative “The Christians and the Pagans,” and Williams’ signature quirky commentary, all leading up to a floor-pounding demand for encores.
Williams’ new album contains a wealth of snapshots-in-song with the added depth of a growing maturity and a theme that weaves the album together. The Green World is rooted in a concept Williams culled from a college Shakespeare class. In the “closed world” of Elizabethan England’s court, “the green world was different. It was unpredictable and chaotic. It was an unmediated place, literally represented by the forest, where you learned things you don’t necessarily want to know about yourself.” The convergence of that wild side of the world with the more day-to-day one we most often live in permeates each song. In “We Learned the Sea,” a ballad-shanty mix, an eight-year sea captain brings back her story of a wild tempest: “I sang in the wind as if God was beside me.” “Playing to the Firmament,” which opens with a drum and organ sequence reminiscent of ABBA, of all things (well, that’s what it brings up for me, anyway), urges us to hold on to a child’s sense of play “’cause the world is too green for all this bad driving. What’s the rush? Dip your brush into this twilight.”
“Spring Street” juxtaposes the temptation to live what Williams calls the “franchised coffee experience” or “Bohemia, Inc.” with its “storefront daisies floating on their neon stems” with the necessary courage to chase the real “spring green life dream.” However, settling for bath beads, scented candles, and “personal growth, inc.” won’t get you to the green world and back with its necessary lessons. “But I’ll push myself up through the dirt and shake my petals free, I’m resolved to being born and so resigned to bravery.” After a bout of real personal growth, Williams herself recently chose small-town upstate New York over the bustle of SoHo.
At the show, Williams introduced “And A God Descended” by talking about “the soft spot in [her] heart for the kind of person who ends up in” a cult and her recurring dreams of becoming a sexy cult deprogrammer—“a sort of X-Files meets Touched by an Angel.” The lyrics dig deeper into crossing that line into a wilder kind of faith and the struggle afterward to “live with what we did with what we saw.” Well-placed recurring images of shards of glass convey a sense of shattered truth and broken reality.
Each song has its own story. Activists struggle for peace in the midst of a war culture in “I Had No Right” (dedicated in concert to “the folks at the Peace & Justice Center, who often do their work in obscurity, but always with grace”). Up-beat toe-tapper “Another Mystery” is a plea for intimacy over the mystery of catwalk model, cinema idol, or goddess. “I don’t want to be fascinating; I want to be fascinated,” explains Williams. “I Won’t Be Your Yoko Ono” explores the flip-side of the popular image of a woman holding the male artist back from greatness. Her trip to Bhutan, “the land of the monastery,” to cure feelings of being “SO blond,” and a bad Buddhist to boot, inspired “What Do You Love More Than Love.” Evocative and mournful, “Calling the Moon” illuminates the tug and pull of our desire for deeper connection with the natural world, and ourselves.
Of all the gems on this album, the most musically spare, “After All” and “It Happens Every Day,” are the most rich. The simply graceful “It Happens Every Day” tells the many small tales unfolding in a neighborhood each day. It opens with only voice and guitar, quiet like the morning. As the day progresses and schoolchildren give way to college students “looking up at their reflection on the other wall, with every new idea, wondering if they’ve changed at all,” keyboard, drums, and bass join in one by one. The gentle emphasis on the details of this life, “the steps we’ve chosen on this day,” makes for a song that distills life down to its essence. A bold challenge—“Go ahead, push your luck, find out how much love the world can hold”—opens “After All,” a ballad that blossoms slowly from “once upon a time I reigned my soul in tight.” Anyone who has emerged from a painful past, or the painful pasts of their parents, will immediately recognize the truths in this song: the despair of being in a place where “you catch your breath and winter starts again,” the relief of discovering that “sometimes the truth is like a second chance,” and the surprise of laughing at “how the world changed me.”
Though Williams is clearly challenging herself to reach different and deeper places in her music, she shows no reluctance to please a crowd with an old favorite. The riotous demand for an encore by the crowd of mostly women, likely mostly lesbian and bi-, produced equally spirited renditions of “Iowa” and “As Cool As I Am.” The audience sang along, swayed to the rhythm, and waved their lighters before breaking into a final round of thunderous applause. Dar may or may not be a “bad” Buddhist, but she is without a doubt a truly transcendent songstress, whether live in a Burlington chapel with ascending planes crossing the darkened window behind her or emanating from the speakers in your living room.
Carolyn Ashby lives in Burlington.
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Catie Curtis & Dar Williams Ira Allen
Chapel, Burlington
A
Crash Course in Roses
The
Green World |
