I awaited the arrival of Dar Williams' newest album, The Green World, with a mixture of eagerness and anxiety. Eagerness, because almost three years had passed since Williams released her previous album, End of the Summer. Anxiety, because that album, although a worthy effort which reached a wider audience than her earlier work, didn't attain the same cohesion and consistent lyrical inventiveness of her first two albums, The Honesty Room and Mortal City. Unlike some, I was intrigued rather than dismayed by her experimentation with pop/rock stylings and full-band backing on some tracks.

When I listened to The Green World for the first time my eagerness was satisfied and my anxiety quelled. On this album, Williams' lyrics sparkle, even as her sound has become more experimental.

In several interviews, Williams has said the title of the album refers to a concept in Shakespearean theater that she learned in college -- "The Green World" is the forest, the wilderness, the home of chaos, creativity, and possibility, while the "closed world" is the more ordered landscape of the court or the village, and the tone of the album, with its focus on inner change and self-discovery, certainly reflects this emphasis.

The title The Green World also seems especially apt because several songs on the album depict the transformative power of the natural world in the lives of human beings. In the first song, "Playing to the Firmament," she speaks to the people she sees on the street, from a carefree child about to lose some of her innocence to society's constraints, to rain-soaked pedestrians and angry rush-hour motorists, urging them to slow down and appreciate the mystery of life around them. Some of the final lines express this entiment with jewel-like clarity and precision: "What's the rush? / Dip your brush into the twilight / There are leaves upon the skylight; / trace your hand, trace your hand."

"We Learned the Sea," one of the more cryptic songs on the album, seems to describe a sailor's relationship with the ocean that stretches back to earliest childhood. In "Calling the Moon," a hauntingly beautiful song inspired, according to the liner notes, partly by Williams' researching of pagan religions in America, the singer addresses the moon: "Oh, moon, make sense of my night, I can see so much from this cold night." The moon's answer encompasses ages of relationship with humanity: "Oh, darkness my work is done / I've poured this bottle of light from the sun / But their anger keeps rising / And they don't understand, I've shown them all that I can / that the world is at hand / And I know, they'll be calling me soon, and if I don't answer I'm only the moon."

Williams has always been able to deftly capture personal experience while avoiding the sentimentality and self-indulgence that has can often be seen in the lyrics of less skilled singer-songwriters, and The Green World features one of the most intimate, even autobiographical, songs she's ever done. In "After All," she paints an unforgettable word-picture of depression. Her choice to live rather than succumb leads her to trace the painful roots of family history, which eventually leads to healing.

On "What Do You Love More Than Love," she comments wittily on romantic preoccupations and her unusual means of escaping them -- a trip to the tiny Buddhist country of Bhutan, which Williams has mentioned as the inspiration for this song. "When my love felt like another addiction," she writes, "I held my breath and packed my bags / I went to the land of the monastery, the sunshine children and the prayer flags." She contrasts the peaceful acceptance of the Bhutanese, who feel that American "superpower / just shortcircuits [their] country" with Western grasping for both romantic love and material wealth. "Spring St." is perhaps another autobiographical song. In it, restless in her current relationship and lifestyle, she is urged by friends to move to Spring Street, a part of the bohemian, artsy enclave of Greenwich Village. Tempted by a change of scene, she also sees the pretension mixed with the bohemian aesthetic.

Folk music as a genre has always held an element of protest, from Woody Gunthrie to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and into the present, but Williams is one of the few contemporary folk singers who can write "political" songs with brilliant imagery that don't (usually) sound preachy. The one overtly political song on The Green World is a gem. "I Had No Right" opens with these compelling words: "God of the poor man / This is how the day began / Eight codefedants, I, Father Berrigan / And only a layman's batch of napalm." Williams does a superb job of speaking in the voice of the famous activist priest, and the poetically ambiguous conclusion of this musical dramatic monologue speaks volumes. Though this album is less activist than her earlier ones have been, throughout The Green World Williams displays her gift for weaving threads of social concern into her work -- even her most personal, confessional songs, are rarely just personal.

Something else Williams has been noted for on her past albums is her mixing of the occasional light-hearted, purely fun (and often funny) song amidst her more serious work. This album is probably her most upbeat overall, but a track like "I Won't Be Your Yoko Ono," a clever ode to Lennon's somewhat overshadowed spouse and to equal romantic and artistic partnership stands out as part of the Williams fun-song tradition. And in the final cut, Williams tells the world that she doesn't want to be "Another Mystery." Mocking the persona often attributed to creative, artistic types, she sings "I don't wanna be another mystery, oh no / I don't wanna see who's lookin' at me, oh no / I wanna be the one to feel the sun, oh whoa / So if you want to see the world with me, let's go." And at the end of the song, I do.

However, my favorite track on the album, "It Happens Every Day," can't be categorized at all. It begins with writerly observations of the strangers in Williams' town and on her street, and builds to a quietly stunning conclusion.

Musically, this album is as much pop/rock as it is folk. A core group of musicians, including Steuart Smith on guitar and keyboards, Graham Maby on bass and Steve Holley on drums, back Williams on almost every track. But Williams hasn't abandoned her roots -- on a number of tracks, the additional instrumentation, although present, recedes into the background, and Dar and her guitar take center stage. This album will surely win Dar many new listeners, and while The Green World may not be exactly the album that longtime fans have been waiting for, I'm sure that many will come to love it as much as I have.

[ by Erin Bush ]