Dar Williams - How to Write a Song that Matters

When I was a boy

The phrase popped in my head with a little bit of melody. I knew it was going to be a song. I understood what I had to do. I had to clear as much time and space around this moment as I could, getting a sense of why the phrase had struck me. I had to approach this short line of music and lyrics with confidence, but also with care, listening to the song as I created it. What clues was I getting from the words, the rhythm, and the feel of this phrase? Where was it taking me?

I gently inquired if When I was like a boy might be more accurate. Isnt gender just a construct? Is there such a thing as being a boy these days? The new phrase, swirling in my head, responded gently. Its not when I was like a boy. Its when I was a boy.

My friend Jaim Morton had taught me a new guitar tuning called DADGAD. I played the phrase on the guitar and started messing with the chords around it. I didnt know their names. Jaim had just taught me how to go up and down the fretboard with the same chord shape, so thats what I did.

Over the next few weeks, with and without my guitar, I started pulling in information, writing couplets, then verses, about that time when I was a boy. Id just heard Judy Kayes version of a Leonard Bernstein song, Dream with Me, sung by Wendy to Peter in a telling of the childrens story Peter Pan . Dream with Me suggested that Wendy was a little in love with Peter Pan, but she also loved being one of his fellow adventurers. I was that Wendy, at twelve, a little in love with the boys who tackled me in football.

I compiled other memories of being in the woods, being on a bike, and being with the other boys. I wrote two verses over two months. Each verse included some aspect of my boyhood freedom, coupled with my limitations as a grown woman.

The feminists are going to kill me, I kept thinking. I was living in Northampton, the lesbian mecca of Massachusetts, its own Neverland for girls who didnt need boys at all. Why would a woman call her childhood her boyhood? But the phrase was insistent. I kept on listening and letting the song unfurl.

Id come to the third verse. How would I end this song? What was the truth? What really happened?

I realized that even though I had lost some of my childhood freedom as a woman, I knew I was part of a movement that was bringing more freedoms and rights to more women. Should I end the song with something about the womens movement or some other feminist theme?

I also started thinking about how the joyful memory of being a boy was something I could talk about with some of my friends. Feminist ideology aside, I had compatriots whom I knew would understand this gender experience. At that moment, my mind brought me to the subject of the final verse.

I was going to turn the focus on men.

Scores of male friends had confided in me over the years. Their common refrain was Im not like other men, and I cant talk with other men about it.

And there it was. I knew how I was going to end the song. The narrator would be hanging out with a man. He would talk about what he lost when he became an adult, and he would begin by saying, When I was a girl.

My musician roommate, a radical feminist, heard the song and said, right off the bat, Whoa. Why did you end with a dude?

But this was the song I felt compelled to write, so this is the song I wrote.

A few days later, I was a last-minute addition in a round-robin concert, and we were playing songs based on phrases taken out of a hat. One scrap of paper said, Come up to my treehouse. We murmured among ourselves, and my friend said, Why dont you play that new one?