The very best thing you can do is to try to write a song that has some sort of impact.

If you're lucky you find something that reflects you, Helps you feel your life, protects you, Cradles you and connects you to everything.

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.

Hegemony is not defined by rivers or conventional borders - it's dominance, it's influence. So we get to decide in our hearts, are we in Iraq to help restore something, or are we there to establish dominance? How can you torture people and say, well, that's just a few bad apples in our culture?

What we need to do is pull the rug out so billionaires in our country wake up one morning and say, wow, 80 percent of the country has a solar panel, and we can't make our billions anymore because other people are making millions, but not billions, on alternative energy that doesn't require war. Suddenly, the war-making machinery is not necessary.

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

I started going out with one of my managers and he really grew me up in a lot of ways. He introduced me not just to being a full-time traveler, which I was, but he was also really very interested in history and art and continued to open my eyes up to regional history; less splashy histories. He was interested in historical societies and stuff like that. He introduced me to a way of looking at the way communities form that is the foundation for the book that I've just finished writing that has to do with what I see as effective community-building wherever I've been traveling.