Dar Williams Quotes

I'm not a pop act, churning stuff out really quickly. I find the music that arises from that style of working is distracted, not particularly profound.

The only thing that's authentic about what a writer writes is his work.

I want to make the songs good. I think this is my main focus.

I think, you know, for me, whatever I need to slot into to make that music the best it can be or help the artists, or whoever I'm working with, achieve whatever vision they have in their head for a song.

I picked and co-wrote the songs that if I was a guy who would be spending my hard-earned money buying an album I would want to hear.

I don't think I'm making any great statements, and I certainly don't think I'm making art.

Where I'm fortunate and why I think I've thrived and survived, through the not having albums out every year-and-a-half, is not taking the songs lightly and trying to make sure I've got consistency.

You always hope for the best when you put something out and try to make the best music you can make, but you can't control what happens after that.

I remember I heard it in an interview with Michael Jackson one day, saying the art is gone, everybody makes records just to make a record. See, I always want the artist that try to build a whole body of music on one album, so you can enjoy it. So you could say, 'I went with him here, I went with him here.'

I don't believe in making a record and rushing it.

I knew the second I finished the first record - 'House Of Balloons' - and had all this material leftover that a trilogy would be best.

I need a big picture. I can't just do a collection of songs; that doesn't work for me.

The fun part about doing our movies is that you're creating something using the talents of people rather than finding these pathetic people who are thrust into these situations. That, to me, is completely artless.

I think that for every artist, it's very important to have an output and to feel very strongly about the music you're producing.

It's pretty funny to me when I hear people say, 'I write six songs every day,' or, 'I turn out a song a day.' I bet you that's a whole week of bad songs.

I really only put stuff out when I have something to say and I feel like I've got a direction and I've got an idea - and that can even take two, two-and-a-half years to flesh out.

I always want to put out an album when I know what it's going to be about. I don't want to throw in all these random songs and say, 'Okay, that's an album.'

I try to deliver because I don't believe that people are deliverin' the same quality of albums.

I had so many songs that were actually sort of finished. And I deleted them. I wrote on my website that I'd put them on the shelf, but that wasn't true. I actually deleted them from my computer. I got sort of trigger-happy and I think I deleted about 200 songs from my computer.

The only thing contrived is the production - you can over-produce to the point you kill a good idea, you can under-produce so that the song's amazing but you'll have folks at a radio station saying they won't play it, so there's this balance, and it has to be true.

When I made Illmatic, I was trying to make the perfect album. It comes from the days of Wild Style. I was trying to make you experience my life. I wanted you to look at hip-hop differently. I wanted you to feel that hip-hop was changing and becoming something more real.

You have to remain strong. That's the kind of filmmaker I want to encourage. Orson Welles was the one who said, you know, you can learn anything you need to know about filmmaking- that's camera, sound, celluloid, video at this point- in four hours. It has nothing to do with anything. It has nothing to do with it... It has to do with what you want to say. If you feel you have something to say, you'll find that way to get it said, on film, and not let anyone or anything chip away at that or tarnish it, because it's something special and precious.

I'm not limited by genre and it doesn't really matter what the genre is as long as the film is going to be new and have some real artistic integrity.

I think all musicians and producers, they know the real goal is to come up with a record that is entertaining and not boring, that's the goal. I think if everyone agrees that that's the goal then it doesn't matter who's the band and it doesn't matter who's the producer. It just means that that you try to realise the ambition no matter what the situation is or who the people are.

To create an album of 12 songs, I've got to write about 80 songs. Half of those are totally weird and rubbish.