A lot of the songs are pretty unmasked. If you listen to "As Cool As I Am," it's not all that different from what you were hearing from Ani DiFranco and some of the other indie women artists of the time. It was still in that context, still seen as folk music.

A lot of men were also becoming more attuned and less afraid of women [in the nineties ].

At this point, I feel like I have roots in a lot of places. I have friends who have put down roots, in Seattle and San Francisco and Portland, and I feel very close to them.

Every time you opt in to kindness Make one connection, used to divide us It echoes all over the world

I remember doing "As Cool As I Am" and Steve Miller, the producer, saying "I really hear a drum loop here. I want to play it for you." When I wrote it, I thought, "This isn't going to sound very folky. I don't think it's going to go with mandolins and banjos." Then he played the loop for me and it sounded right.

The kind of organic wave, the way that waves move, and I'm not just talking about feminism, the way that a social movement might rise like a wave. It's harder to build any kind of wave now. Things are important to you and then they recede within a day. That's the only thing that keeps me from believing that there's going to be any one organic big wave; although the Americana (music) thing has been happening for a while.

As I said in one of my songs, we're still abolishing slavery, but nobody says it's a good thing. Nobody justifies it.