The last record was a big change for you. Would you say that the New England feel is back in this record or would you say you’re still progressing onward?

When I put my life into chapters, I realized that the most exciting chapters were when I have found myself in New York with people who were blowing my mind. So I call that New York, and I don’t think I’m ever going to leave that. I would say this album was a fusion of the people I’ve toured and played with before coming together, which resulted in a lovely, interesting, sparky collision.

How do your older fans respond to the newer sound?

Like post-modernism, you’re showing your seams—this is showing my seams. People kept on saying, “This is the new sound, this is the new sound,” and I’ve been doing really produced folk-pop since my second album. I was with a producer who had just been working with a bunch of artists who basically had to obscure their lyric finalities in production, and he said “You obviously work so hard for your lyrics and melodies, so lets keep them a little more bare,” so it was a little bit more bare on Mortal City, but still, it’s folk-pop. Finally I realized that the origin of “this is a new sound” was really coming from my manager [laughs], as a promotional thing. But I see it much more as a gentle expansion than a new direction.

Lots of journalists have this idea that you literally have this road map, and here’s the map of where you’ve been, and you chart out exactly where you want to go. That’s not the way it works, especially as you get older. When you get older you go, “What’s the best working situation?” I give up trying to even pretend that I was sketching a map. And sometimes journalists feel betrayed because they think that you did something on purpose and it’s really like, “Why wouldn’t I want to work with my best friend Stuart?” But why wouldn’t I want to work with the people I’ve toured with, so why not bring them together. So it’s sort of these soft collisions, and whatever comes out of them we call the future and the new sound.

Journalists are always looking for the next person to believe in, finding things in songs that you never knew were there…

Yeah, yeah, it’s such an interesting mirror. Journalists are looking at us but we’re looking at the journalists. There’s actually one in particular that I won’t name, but he writes scathingly about artists and I know it’s because he feels betrayed by his own aging body, his own aging sensibility, so he’s a hawk-eye out for the betrayal of the artist towards commercial interests, or whoring themselves out, or watering themselves down. Every album will have a concession, no matter how unconscious it is, every album will have a “Oh wow, is this going to pay the mortgage, is production going to help me pay my mortgage somewhere,” but the great thing is that an album that makes it out into the world will always have more art than artisan—it will have what you ate for breakfast in there. You try to make it as spiritually spontaneous as possible, and it’s very important to believe in that kind of spontaneity and that kind of spirit. And it’s important to wake up and remember your dreams, and it’s important to be honest to the people you’re sleeping with, and that does help your music. And sometimes, you don’t know what’s leading you.

I had a funny thing happen with the last band I was touring with during The Beauty of the Rain which was that this guy, Mike Visceglia, the bass player, said “I need to talk to you, can I come to your room?” And I thought, “He’s going to quit the band,” and “What am I going to say? This is so heartbreaking.” And then I thought, “Maybe he’s going through something personal, does he want to talk?” Whenever something comes to a head it’s always in Kansas because it’s right in the middle of the country, like just as the tour bus heads west it hits the fan. He sat down and said, “I know you work with a range of people when you tour, but I really want you to look at this configuration as something to stay with for a while because we’ve really got something going.” And that conversation is what made me excited about coming into the studio with those musicians.

What was the general inspiration for the new record? There were definitely certain themes in there.

I think with “Comfortably Numb” and “Empire” and “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere” and even “Beautiful Enemy,” there’s kind of a core sadness of the way of the world of which I’m a part of. “Beautiful Enemy” is about my own nation’s state with its fortresses and enemies and showing off and wanting religious splendor, so I tried to put myself inside this. But there is this kind of awareness of life in our present empire. And then there’s kind of a theme of putting it out on the table without metaphor, like how I wrote a song for my son, or I wrote a song for my husband, they’re usually within a microcosm of something else or vice versa and this is much more sort of like “I love you” to my husband, so it’s more personal temperature reading and then public temperature reading as well. “Teen for God” is a part of that.

I thought that was a real witty, smart track—it almost seemed sarcastic.

It’s like a little love note of an agnostic self to a God-filled adolescent. Teenagers are really filled with spirit—there’s grandiosity, there’s orthodoxy. There’s stuff in your adult life that you try to get back in some form or another like, if they don’t like smoking they hate smoking, or if you do something morally ambiguous their sense of betrayal is completely strong and if they’re faithful, even more, it’s very orthodox and very fundamentalist. And I have a memory of that being a beautiful thing for me and I have a memory of that being something that was completely susceptible to American dieting culture and all of the forces that make girls feel like their sexuality is dangerous—like you feel lust and suddenly there’s going to be a big bucket of pig’s blood poured on somebody and people catching on fire and knives flying in the air [laughs]. So it’s like both, and it’s exploited and it’s also, even in its pure form, something that’s the raw material for a really beautiful change into the wiser self. I don’t regret that I had that kind of past, and that’s what I really wanted to get across. I had to ask myself, “Where is this song going to go? Is it going to go to this really pissed off place?” I don’t resent the fact that I fell for that thing hook, line, and sinker—I wanted to be a pure thing.

Now that you have a child, how has your music been affected?

Basically, I’ll spend my day thinking about solar panels and recycling and doctor’s appointments and whether I’ve had protein [laughs]. My day will be filled with all of these thoughts, and then the little songbird will come to me. I’m working on a song called “the book of love,” and it’s completely unrelated, and I love stories so much that my head will be immersed in a story that’s completely fiction and I’ll bring in different characters, whether I’m writing a story or writing a song. And I have no idea why there’s such a wide schism between the stuff that’s relevant to me in my daily life and the stuff I write about. My assumption is that it percolates over time and that some day it will hit me why I want to write about this little guy [her son]—he’s very much his own little man. And I have to respect that it’s too material to capture right now and I really respect him for that. He’s just this giant, rambling, young dude.

You mentioned covering the song “Comfortably Numb” earlier and I was wondering what made you decide to turn the song into a duet with Ani DiFranco.

Well, it made it more everything: more political, more soulful, more disembodied. Everybody was really supportive when I said I wanted to do it and then when Ani added her thing, which she sent to us, she said she was too busy and she probably couldn’t—initially she said yes and then she said “Sorry, I don’t think so.” Then, the next thing we saw was this CD with a little “hope you like it” on it and a heart. It arrived on my birthday in the studio and it was weird because even when I was 27 and found out I was going to be performing with Joan Baez for this recording she did, I already had this thing in place, this defense of like, “Well, okay, that sounds really workable, I can’t get too excited.” It’s like compression vocals, and it made it past the compression. I don’t understand why more people don’t call her the Dylan of our generation, and, like Dylan, she writes what’s out there and doesn’t really have an eye to where she fits in historically—poetry just comes out of her fingers. So part of me just doesn’t want to slow her down, and ask her to do something that would get in the way of her doing her thing, but my keyboard player played with her and encouraged me to ask her.

So she sent this thing that was multi-tracked, completely synced in with my voice where she needs to be, totally artfully playing around—she really cared. When she sent the thing in it made it a track. There’s a political longing in there, there’s a longing for a time when you felt more and, for whatever reasons, I think we have a looming environmental crisis that is doubled with such comfort. There’s a difference between a human conscience and, say, a corporation that mirrors that conscience. We cannot leave the graphics, and the political actions of these corporations; we need to always be doing the people thing with our “handmade posters,” so to speak. I think “comfortably numb” is where we are sort of allowing our larger entities to define the struggle for us. Like Starbucks and Borders for example: they’re really being responsible about bringing independent artists out, and both do lots of really ethical things to promote art, but we cannot become “comfortably numb” because the messiness of the human conscience and what that leads us to do collectively is not really in fashion, but it’s really important. My argument is that you’re not going to bring, like, Wal-Mart to its knees because you bought a shirt from the “boutique dude” instead of Wal-Mart, it’s just that you’re going to keep that boutique guy in business because he’ll be able to make a living wage and he won’t have to work for Wal-Mart.

Has that political conscience always been inherent in you?

I think my parents instilled in me the ethic of “if you’re lucky enough to have an education, if you’re lucky enough to have a family that loves you, if you’re lucky enough to have these things, then service is very important.” My dad was a gentleman farmer on top of what he did, and they were really into recycling so that’s what I inherited the most.

They were very dedicated Democrats; there was a big campaign in our town that my mom worked on when I was five through seven, to change the town council, to kind of kick out the old guard and bring in a new guard. The first Jewish person was elected to the town board, and she said that change changed the whole town to this day. My parents would never call themselves hippies, but my mom worked at Planned Parenthood during Roe v. Wade, would bring us to anti-war rallies and join all the environmental stuff at the height of that ecological, early ‘70s thing. I always thought my parents were extremely wealthy [laughs] and they weren’t. I always thought we didn’t ski because we believed in staying home and being sort of populists. I’ve encountered a lot of women with eating disorders with that service ethic, and, basically, at some point you do have to stand up for yourself and say “I’m going to eat whatever the hell I want, I’m going to do whatever the hell I want, I’m a good person, but I also have the right to respect my own happiness, even laziness and selfishness.”

Actually, I believe in God now. I woke up one morning and believed in God, after being religious for so long, after being so many religions, I finally woke up one morning sort of post-religion and believed in God. And one of the things I thank God for is that feeling of interdependence, like when I recycle an aluminum can, which I barely drink from because it’s a mined mineral, but when I see aluminum cans in a trash can it makes me cross-eyed. That aside, though, when I recycle aluminum I feel thankful that I have an interdependent heart, that I see what I do will be affecting someone and vice versa. And so I actually feel sorry for the people who didn’t have experiences like that ‘cause it doesn’t have to be a parent, it can be a teacher or a friend or someone that you really fall in love with and that you want to be like—that changes your music taste, make you try things you never would have tried before [laughs]. At that wavelength, giving a shit about the world is a much better way to live. I just thank God that I got it because these people that live in mobile fortresses, there’s something fundamentally whack about that—civilizations are about living with other people. So it’s sad when I see the spread of that because I think, especially coming out of the ‘70s and ‘60s, we were just headed towards a more “groovy” place.

That reminds me of the track “Echoes,” which is very up-beat. It had a John Lennon “Imagine” kind of touch to it...

You know I didn’t write that because you know I can’t. Maybe that is because I’m so steeped in that post-modern world, but I’m so glad to have recorded it. And it’s funny because the people that are responding to it the most are men in their fifties. And, if you look at men in their fifties, those are the kinds of guys that had that love of John Lennon and even Bob Dylan. What I think these people are relating to is remembering what it felt like to live with that kind of cynicism. I think skepticism is really healthy, I think cynicism is like guilt, it just doesn’t have a lot of drive to it—it keeps you in a very stagnant place. I think “Echoes” is a cool song, but it also does the thing—I think about it in my daily life now. When someone says something hostile to me I try to block it a little bit and try to let the echo stop there.

You’ve always had a very large female fanbase. Do you see that you’re drawing in more men now with the “newer” sound?

Jamband guys, sure. I think the virtuosity of my band has something to do with drawing in men too, because we are growing together more. If guys are guitar dudes then I have a lot of lyrics and I can see why that’s not the demographic I’m going to hit. But usually women who drag their boyfriends along to shows—sometimes I see extremely bored-looking guys—are usually pretty cool about it afterwards. I mean, I love good guitar sounds, but for me I’m still a teenager on my bed writing lyrics before I even pick up my guitar sometimes.

What are you listening to right now?

Moby, which is really interesting. And I’m also listening to this thing called African Playground which is a Putamayo afro-pop compilation for kids—it’s so good. I love stuff like Moby, and part of me loves the sophistication of it, and there’s part of me that loves it as a guilty pleasure because it’s very cinematic. And I’m listening to the Harry Potter book on CD in my car too [laughs].

You’re also writing books, right?

Yep, I wrote a young adult book. The publisher wrote me and said “Look, we’re the Harry Potter people, we’re doing well, we’re taking risks, and if you want to write something for the ages of 3 to 17…” So I wrote one about an 11-year-old because it’s the golden time, just before you become an asshole and everyone becomes an asshole to you. But now she’s 12, and I prolonged the 11-year-old coolness, like she’s in love with a 16-year-old but she also loves science [laughs]. She’s romantic but she’s not involved.

Dar Williams was interviewed by Michael David Spies.