Sixties folk rock was my original muse and the folk audience-people who listen to music off the beaten track-fostered my career. I definitely don't want to abandon the genre but I also need to make sure I'm Dar Williams first.

I'm just trying to be part of the movement that decentralizes and hopefully creates peace. By supporting smaller, democratic structures, you can effect change.

But I benefit from the taxes I pay because I know how to access the benefits of the taxes.

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

Basically, I have found that people who have tried to start communities out of good feelings or hippie-dippie abstract concepts of love - it doesn't work. But if you just concentrate on what is the identity of your town - its waterfalls, its battles, its notable mill strike or those things - you dig into what your town is from its rock formations to its history to its food. Then this thing called community happens all the time.

But where do we come up with this notion of a woman in which the less space you take up, the more you're worth?

Now that I believe in God, I have an extra layer of saying I'll write about what I write about and assume that I'm being offered the opportunity to illuminate something important. But when you think you are too important, you become some sort of fascist.