Dar Williams.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: "My Better Self" released - Interview

Folk singer Dar Williams came out with her ninth album last fall, My Better Self, that addresses some of the major issues of the Bush Age. With songs like "Teen for God," "Empire," and "Beautiful Enemy," along with covers of Neil Young's "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" and Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" (where she's joined by Ani DiFranco), Williams makes her statement on our current moment.

Inspired by Joan Baez, whom she toured with early on in her career, Williams has often expressed her feminist and environmental convictions. A graduate of Wesleyan University, she may be most famous for her earlier songs "I Will Not Be Afraid of Women" and "The Christians and the Pagans"--about a holiday family dinner where people get over their differences.

In addition to making music, Williams has published a novel for young adults entitled Amalee, and she is just completing a sequel to it.

I spoke with her on November 2 last year in Madison, Wisconsin. I picked her up at the Barrymore Theatre, where she was rehearsing for her show that night. As we drove over to Audio for the Arts, where we recorded the interview, we shared our disgust with Bush's policies and our shock at Katrina. After we set up, she mentioned how outrageous it is to make people "swim in toxic stew for the next five years." As she put it, "Justice does not get served."

I'd never met her before, but she seemed very familiar to me: intelligent, engaging, informed, dedicated--the type of stellar activist you can find almost anywhere in America. Except this one plays the guitar, has a beautiful voice, and sports a poetic sensibility. And she's been using those talents to reach her audiences for more than a decade now.

As I drove her back to the Barrymore, we talked about kids, since she has a two-and-a-half-year-old son. And she had me point out where the Willy St. Grocery Co-op was, which she recognized as one of the nation's most successful. "I used to work in a coop," she said. I wasn't surprised.

Q: My Better Self seems more political than some of your previous albums. Do you have a heightened sense of urgency right now?

Dar Williams: That's right on. It's a temperature reading for what's going on, for better and for worse. I've been sussing out the politics that sort of came to my doorstep, along with some of the more overt things, such as the song called "Empire."

Q: What is the temperature reading? Are we at 1057

Williams: In terms of our democracy, we are sort of shrugging our shoulders and saying, oh dear, Guantanamo, 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...