Brian D'Ambrosio interview with Dar Williams

Описание: Interview: Moved by Metaphor, Dar Williams Commits to the Hummingbird Highway
By Brian D’Ambrosio
Dar Williams toured a spice farm in Belize set amid pristine jungles and primordial Mayan ruins. At a bumpy junction, the driver told the passengers that there were three possible options: steering east, veering west, or sticking to the middle road, which he called the Hummingbird Highway. The instant wholly seized Williams’ attention. Something about the trail choices resonated, especially the enticing description of the middle one, striking her as a vivid metaphor of human life.

Williams, one of folk music’s most cherished gifts, titled her newest album, “Hummingbird Highway,“ homage to the interdependence of boundless getaway and eternal return, another impressive offering from someone whose heart first journeyed to music long ago, and whose emotional vigilance and poetic vigor seem to only intensify with age.
Indeed, the more Williams thought about the variety of roads, the more similarities she hit upon between herself and the hummingbird.

“Hummingbirds have these fantastic migrations and hummingbirds need constant fueling,” said Williams.

Shortly after the Belize trip, Williams met a woman who told her that she and her daughter had matching hummingbird tattoos, which the woman described as symbolic of distance and closeness, departure and arrival, the desire to fly in each and every direction with an understanding that the lucky ones can always ground again at home. Williams treasured the richness of all of this imagery. Once again, she contemplated the hummingbird, finding scores of analogies to the human experience, extracting her own correlations.

“Curiosity, love, longing, we’ve got all of these ways of getting around,” said Williams. “And it’s not always going forward. Like an artist, the hummingbird goes upside down and goes inside out… Flexibility, creativity, fastness, travel – they all make for a complicated person and parent. “Hummingbird Highway” was written from the perspective of a child, one with a peripatetic, depressed, perhaps bipolar, frenetic, creative, generous, loving parent.”

In a recording career that began with a demo tape in 1990 titled “I Have No History,“ Williams has long leaned on songwriting (“Hummingbird Highway” is her 11th album) and other forms of writing (she has written several travelogues and non-fiction books) to cast off and expose her blood and beauty to the world.

Her creative journey was nurtured early in childhood, bolstered by the support of parents who, as she said, “leaned into the commons culturally.” Born and raised in Westchester County, New York, music was always in the air at home. So, too, was love and praise.

To read more of Brian D'Ambrosio's interview with Dar Williams, visit Brian D'Ambrosio's Substack, Americana Highways and Americana UK.