Search - Dar Williams :: My Better Self

As the folk singer-songwriter continues to incorporate more pop elements, Dar Williams conjures a whole coming-of-age era in an album that suggests a 1970s soundtrack suffused with 1960s idealism. My Better Self's opening track, "Teen for God," evokes the bouncy innocence of Bible camp and the bittersweet ironies of innocence lost. "Echoes" sounds like it could have inspired a singalong around that campfire, a secular hymn for the global village about the big impact of small actions. On Williams's revival of Neil Young's "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere," Marshall Crenshaw provides vocal counterpoint and stinging guitar, while she teams with Ani DiFranco for a disembodied duet on Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb." With its intimations of immortality, "Blue Light of the Flame" features a shimmering keyboard generating space-age atmospherics reminiscent of early David Bowie. "So Close to My Heart" and "The Hudson" (with harmonies from Patty Larkin) return Williams's music to its folk base, but much of the rest suggests rites of passage, at a time when all sorts of "better selves" seem open to possibility, with the radio always on. --Don McLeese More Dar Williams

Mortal City

The Green World

The Beauty of the Rain