As Cool As I Am

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As Cool As I Am Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Yeah, there was a time
I didn't like the love, I liked the climbers
I was no sister then
I was running out of time and one liners
And I was afraid, like you are
When you're too young to know the time
And so I watched the way
You take your fear and hoard the horizon
You point, you have a word
For every woman you can lay your eyes on
Like you own them just because you bought the time
And you turn to me, you say you hope I'm not threatened

[Chorus]
Oh, I'm not that petty
As cool as I am
I thought you'd know this already
I will not be afraid of women
I will not be afraid of women

[Verse 2]
So now we're at a club
You watch the woman dance, and she is drunk
And she is smiling and she's falling in a slow, descending funk
And the whole bar is loud and proud
And everybody's trying, yeah
You play the artist
Saying, "Is it how she moves, or how she looks?"
I say, It's loneliness
Suspended to our own like grappling hooks
And as long as she's got noise, she's fine
But I could teach her how I learned to dance
When the music's ended

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[Chorus]
Oh, and that's not petty
As cool as I am
I thought you'd know this already
I will not be afraid of women
I will not be afraid of women

[Bridge]
You tried to make me doubt
To make me guess
Tried to make me feel like a little less
Oh, I liked you when your soul was bared
I thought you knew how to be scared
And now, it's amazing what you did to make me stay
But truth is just like time, it catches up and it just keeps going

[Verse 3]
Oh, and so I'm leaving
You can find out how much better things can get
And if it helps
I'd say I feel a little worse than I did when we met
So when you find someone else
You can try again, it might work next time
You look out of the kitchen window
And you shake your head and say low
"If I could believe that stuff
I'd say that woman has a halo"
And I look out and say, "Yeah, she's really blonde,"
And then I go outside to join the others
I am the others

[Chorus]
Oh, and that's not easy
I don't know what you saw
I want somebody who sees me
I will not be afraid of women
I will not be afraid of women

About

This song bio is unreviewed

“As Cool As I Am”, the opening track off 1996 album Mortal City, sees Dar Williams letting go of fear of other women, leaving a partner who enforces that fear to become ‘the others’. Said Dar of the song:

But ‘As Cool As I Am’ is basically saying I’m not going to be in a position of allowing myself to feel competitive with women because that is a black hole. And it’s being in a relationship with a person who encourages you to do things competitively, that this person is really rejecting. Life is hard enough: you are going to feel envious, you are going to say, ‘Oh, why not me, what’s wrong with me?’ So if you’re in a relationship with some schmuck who’s encouraging that avenue of thinking when there’s so many opportunities to go down that avenue without that schmuck, ya gotta cut him loose. That’s schmuck behavior."