One of my favorites.

I do hope she does “After All” tonight, MRG. The Socialist would call it yet another example of the “depressive” music I seem drawn to, but I think it’s anything but that.

After All

– music and lyrics by Dar Williams

Go ahead, push your luck

Find out how much love the world can hold

Once upon a time I had control

And reigned my soul in tight

Well the whole truth

Is like the story of a wave unfurled

But I held the evil of the world

So I stopped the tide

Froze it up from inside

And it felt like a winter machine

That you go through and then

You catch your breath and winter starts again

And everyone else is spring bound

And when I chose to live

There was no joy – it’s just a line I crossed

It wasn’t worth the pain my death would cost

So I was not lost or found

And if I was to sleep

I knew my family had more truth to tell

And so I traveled down a whispering well

To know myself through them

Growing up, my Mom had a room full of books

And hid away in there

Her father raging down a spiral stair

‘Til he found someone

Most days his son

And sometimes I think

My father, too, was a refugee

I know they tried to keep their pain from me

They could not see what it was for

But now I’m sleeping fine

Sometimes the truth is like a second chance

I am the daughter of a great romance

And they are the children of the war

Well the sun rose with so many colors

It nearly broke my heart

And worked me over like a work of art

And I was a part of all that

So go ahead, push your luck

Say what it is you’ve got to say to me

We will push on into that mystery

And it’ll push right back

And there are worse things than that

‘Cause for every price

And every penance that I could think of

It’s better to have fallen in love

Than never to have fallen at all

‘Cause when you live in a world

Well it gets in to who you thought you’d be

And now I laugh at how the world changed me

I think life chose me after all

I hope she does “Better Things” too, even if she didn’t write it. I still think of it as the definitive version. And I’ve never heard her to “Flinty Kind of Woman” live. That would be fun! And “You’re Aging Well” would be great to hear.

Come to think of it, if she did every song I wanted her to perform, she’d still be singing come the weekend. The lady sings no bad songs.