Director of operations at Historic Fort Steuben and the Steubenville Visitors Center.
Any regular reader of my column will already know of my love for Williamsburg in Virginia. As a historian, Williamsburg was like Disneyland to me. The experience of visiting a place with so much history and a living sense of the past was captivating. Lucky for me, that feeling has generally stayed with me all these years. I am fortunate that in an old space, be it a house, battlefield or on a city street, I can almost feel the past. I don’t believe in ghosts as specters that haunt the living, but I do believe that memory can leave an imprint on a space. Whether that imprint is something measurable, or perhaps it is something that is internal, is up for debate. That also could just be the personality of a hopeless nostalgic at heart, but I also find that you don’t always need to be in the presence of a historic place to feel its history.
Dar Williams
Are You Out There
The End Of The Summer
Teenagers, Kick Our Butts
Better Things
Dar Williams s End of the Summer finds her following in the techno-folkie footsteps of Suzanne Vega and Rickie Lee Jones. Most of the tracks feature muscular rhythms provided by Sammy Merendino s programmed drum loops, and.
more » thickened textures provided by layers of electric and acoustic guitars. This new approach pays dividends for a singer/songwriter whose thin soprano and coffeehouse lyrics have often proven underwhelming in the past. Here she is encouraged by producer Steven Miller to cram as many words as possible into the herky-jerky verses and then release the tension with a chorus of simple statements and catchy melody. This allows her to run verbal riffs on slackers in Party Generation, on therapy in What Do You Hear in These Sounds, and on middle age in Teenagers, Kick Our Butts. Some of these riffs are witty and some aren t, but they pay off in satisfy