When I was a teenager in the mid-90s, I loved singer-songwriters. You might have found me at a stop light or on the highway, with friends or alone, in Old Blue (my beat-up Oldsmobile Ninety Eight), lighting a smoke, peeking at printed out MapQuest directions, taking swigs from the Coca-Cola I always had on-hand, all while swapping out discs from an enormous and too full CD binder and into the Discman which was connected to my car stereo via a cassette player adapter, singing along (screaming along, depending on the track) to Tori Amos’ “Happy Phantom,” Ani DiFranco’s “Both Hands” (but only the live version recorded in Buffalo, NY from Living In Clip), Lisa Loeb’s “Stay,” or slipping into a thousand-yard stare while maybe crying to Tracy Chapman’s full-of-longing “The Promise,” Eponine’s heartbreaking solo “On My Own” from Les Misérables, or Patty Smyth and Don Henley’s duet “Sometimes Love Just Ain’t Enough.”
You may have seen Old Blue and me on the shoulder of the Eisenhower Expressway, and maybe a friend or two, arms in the air, bodies swaying to the cover of Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” blaring from the open windows.
I did, in fact, dance like no one was watching. But they were and they were telling us to get back in my car.
Of course, this is a major symptom of being “a free spirit,” a condition I am still afflicted by.
It may have been late ‘97 or early ‘98 when I first heard “As Cool As I Am” by Dar Williams on WONC—a radio station in Naperville, Illinois owned and operated by North Central College that runs out of a renovated home near the not-as-quaint-as-it-used-to-be downtown area.
With its digeridoo, fast-tempo, and general upbeat mood, it makes a great first track for Williams’ 1996 album Mortal City. The song’s narrator breaks down the division and degradation of women fostered by the roving eyes of their lovers, and how she vows to “not be afraid of women.”
When I finally took “As Cool As I Am” out of endless repeat purgatory, which I’m sure lasted days if not weeks, and just let the album play, the second track’s guitar and cello opening took me inward, guiding me directly to my sad-boy melancholic, womp-womp heart. The song is called “February.”
There are a few lines in the third verse that my teenage mind could not full-well grasp:
And February was so long that it lasted into March
And found us walking a path alone together
You stopped and pointed and you said "That's a crocus"
And I said "What's a crocus?" and you said "It's a flower"
And I tried to remember, but I said "What's a flower?"
You said "I still love you"
What’s a flower? What does she mean? Sure, teenage me had no idea what a crocus was but…what’s a flower??? Silly goose, I must’ve thought. What a silly goose.
Of course, when she gets to “I still love you,” all desperate and true, I’m still in. Which is why it moved from CD to mp3 to a liked song on streaming. And how it prompted me last summer to ask my wonderful coworker (now, friend) Danielle Lazarin (author of Back Talk—which you should read if, you know, you like good books):
Do you like Dar Williams?
I don’t know if it was Danielle’s amazing hair, that always looked like she’d just come off a beach, or what but my instincts were correct. In no time, we were discussing the aforementioned lines.
Which is how I ended up making that video with my dear friend Piper, whom I first met in film school.
Of course, I understand the deterioration of relationships far better than I did 30 years ago, and so the lyrics hold me a little tighter now than they did then.
Though I hope, unless under the grip of a neurodegenerative disorder, that I never have to wonder:
What’s a flower?
Oh, Dar.
