Dar Williams Quotes

For the longest time in Denmark I didn't want to say what I was politically. I thought it was irrelevant.

I'm very political without being political. I don't know how to speak proper political language.

I am political. But not politically active. I'm not my dad. I'll never write polemic, as he did.

Me talking about political issues on a social platform was kind of an accident. It's something that's a part of my everyday - it's super central to who I am as a person.

There's no question that the political is personal.

The political is personal.

If music's a political place, I'm out.

The only time you'll see me as a Democrat is when I play Sophia. In the real world I'm a Republican from head to toe.

The question for me is not are we political, but how are we political? We need to be politically engaged, but peculiar in how we engage.

In my case I've never not been political, though religion tended to overshadow it in my acid days.

It would be cool for someone to ask me about some of the structural choices I make with my albums.

It's exciting to me that people know that I'm someone who's very political.

There's something about live recordings now that's too hi-fi.

I didn't want to make a record that was just guitar and voice, that was just the technology available to me. At the time, I remember thinking, "I am making a Faust album." That didn't translate.

[T]he visibility of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness. ... The very notion of "style" needs to be approached historically. Awareness of style as a problematic and isolable element in a work of art has emerged in the audience for art only at certain historical moments - as a front behind which other issues, ultimately ethical and political, are being debated.

I would not describe myself as a political writer except in the sense that the personal is political, which is something that I do strongly believe. And in that sense American Gods is a very personal novel and a political novel. I was trying to describe the experience of coming to America as an immigrant, the experience of watching the way that America tends to eat other cultures.

It's a pretty crazy thing in which I tried to make songs, real songs, not the quick stuff like on a tape. A dose of Kendrick Lamar, a dose of J. Cole... because it's got to be an album that goes [in the] club.

I got a new 4-track cassette recorder a year or so after high school. For a while I would just stare at it thinking, how am I going to do this if I don't play guitar or keyboards? How am I going to write and record a song if I don't know how to play any instruments? I mean, I played the violin, but I didn't know anything about how to work a 4-track.

There is something wrong with using faith - belief without evidence - as a political weapon. I wouldn't say there is something similar about using science. Science - or the products of science like technology - is just a way of achieving something real, something that happens, something that works.

I feel like my political beliefs are rooted in the conservatism that I was raised with.

I've never really been a conservative. I've never really been a Republican, never been any of that. I've only been in it for me. And proof of that is that I will not denounce Trump.

Ben Carson and I don't have much in common politically. But the fact is when you have kids getting involved in the political process, doing their best to elect the candidates of their choice, that's what the American democracy is about.

I think, for some artists, the fear of taking on a political identity stems from not wanting to be pigeonholed as political actor or a political musician. It becomes this thing where somehow your art can no longer exist on its own and be multifaceted.

I think Def Jam happened to be one of the labels that really didn't have a good grip on things that were going on. I'll say that - that's my political answer.

The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definitely has more one-star reviews on Amazon. But if literary value is real, no one seems to be able to locate it or define it very well. We're increasingly adrift in a grey void of aesthetic relativism.