Silly Little Country

I Love the Continuities in Art

It all started with this post.
Nostalgically, I thought about what the first song that attracted me to Dar Williams was - and it was the babysitter song.

She uses here a narrative form I love - the narrator who simply does not get what is going on. It is lovely and challenges the listener to do more than simply accept the surface story. It is a form far too little used. When it cruises to its end it is crushing.
In this song it is brutal and as a result, totally lovely. "She's the best one we've ever had."
Last night I started reading Anne Tyler's "Celestial Navigation". What a self-incriminating narrator in the first chapter. Where can she be going?
I have roughly the same trust in Dar Williams and Anne Tyler. Two great artists in two very different forms.
And they can find different forms, if not themes.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 5:03 PM