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

Slavery doesn't have any positives.

Every once in a while I'll say something...I dropped the F-bomb early on in my career. There was this lesbian couple and they looked super-hip. One of them looked at me and shook her head, like "Don't do that." I think she was doing it to say, "It doesn't work." She didn't say anything but it was this cautionary moment. I knew it didn't work. There are just so many other words to choose from.

It's a collective truth that slavery is wrong, that child labor is wrong, that gross inequality is wrong. God didn't send it.

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.

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

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.