I think the music was speaking to that opening up of whose voice gets heard and how multidimensional that voice can be.

In terms of our democracy, we are sort of shrugging our shoulders and saying, oh dear, Guantánamo, that's so awful, that's so awful, but it's here. The pendulum usually swings from left to right and then right to left, but there are so many people in power who have taken the pendulum and just pinned it to the right that there is a fear that it's never going to swing back.

There's always people who came 600 miles to hear the song you didn't play.

And the ones that know you so well are the ones that can swallow you whole.

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

Everyone has to decide how they're going to appear in their lives, how they're going to put themselves out there to the world.

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.