Men make angry music and it's called rock-and-roll women include anger in their vocabulary and suddenly they're angry and militant.

I basically get stereotyped a lot in terms of being a girl and writing 'chick' music for teenage girls or something. I think, if anything, the press kind of, because of my gender and my age, tends to kind of relegate my work to this sort of special-interest group. It's part of the cultural dynamic, I guess.

I seriously hate pop music and all things super-commercial.

I see a lot of connections between folk and punk music just because they're both subcorporate music - I mean, traditionally.

I've been trying to learn how to not be so conflicted about things like my own anger. I've always had a place in my music for my anger as a way of compensating for not having a mechanism to express it in my everyday life. So I've been trying to be more true to myself, and that helps me to chill out a little bit. But politically, uh-uh. No.

Pop stardom is not very compelling. I'm much more interested in a relationship between performer and audience that is of equals. I came up through folk music, and there's no pomp and circumstance to the performance. There's no, like, 'I'll be the rock star, you be the adulating fan.'

Ah, reality TV: where opportunists delight in exposing opportunism! It's kind of like the indie music scene.

The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending.

Social topics may hit too close to home for people, but then again, if you pull a heartstring, then that's what country music is. It's not just songs about getting drunk and leaving your girl.

For me music is a vehicle to bring our pain to the surface, getting it back to that humble and tender spot where, with luck, it can lose its anger and become compassion again.