The first concert I saw was Cheryl Wheeler.

Therapy was the biggest romance of my life.

I try to be careful not to do single concerts where I fly out, do my show, turn around and go home.

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.

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

There's the wind And the rain And the mercy of the fallen Who say, "Hey, it's not my place To know what's right" There's the weak And the strong And the many stars that guide us We have some of them inside us

I came out of that and said I don't want to go back to feeling depressed. So I asked myself, what can I be optimistic about, in terms of the course of the planet? And I discovered there was no end to the optimism I felt.