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“If you feel that something’s going to be beautiful, just run with that peacock feather.”

This is kind of a statement too: To open your album with a seven-minute epic is a very personal thing to do, a way of declaring, This is the way it’s going to be, I’m following my muse here, people…whatever. Starting off with your biggest, most grandiose statement is an intriguing way of messing with our familiar sense of structure.

And then the rest is just afterglow…

These songs are very, very arranged; you’ve paid a lot of attention to detail. A very beautiful piece titled “Cassandra” is a good example of that.

The way I write songs is, usually I’ll get a little feeling, or a little snippet of something on the news or something, and if it resonates with me and stays with me for a day or two then I think, Well, then maybe there’s space in there for a Statement. So I was watching Al Gore, and even though he’d gotten his Oscar or whatever it was for An Inconvenient Truth, it was still like everyday there were people in global warming denial. And I just thought, Well, he’s the Cassandra of our time; no matter how many times he tells the story over and over again, there’s always going to be someone that’s going to try and disprove him, or they’re not going to listen to him. I thought, I don’t want to write a song about oil protests, but there’re so many Cassandras of this time; if you look at the Tea Party and the things that they believe, it’s kind of like there’s this cacophony of anti-intellectual paganism going on. [laughs] So it was sort of like, “The truth is out there, and no one wants to hear it.”

But I also don’t like a lecture or polemic, and I had that piano figure that –– to my uneducated ear, ‘cause I don’t know anything about classical music –– that reminds me of what I think Debussy would write like. That was another thing, that I wanted to free myself to have those moments that I thought were just pretty. I actually have got some criticism about that; there’s one review out there that said the album is “too pretty.” And I thought, Well, what’s so terrible about that? [laughs] And that’s also an aspect of foppish: If you feel that something’s going to be beautiful, just run with that peacock feather.

So in “Cassandra,” a lot of the lyrics are about how everything’s really terrible. [laughs] I tried to couch them in humor, and also I like to look at things from a whole bunch of different angles, so hopefully if you scrutinize the lyrics they show my own confusion and my own conclusion.

Obviously the challenge is to address these themes without being a big drag about it. The video for “Hey Little Jesus” shows your witty way of dealing in slightly less weighty concerns. I especially like how JC gets force-fed guacamole and chips at the end.

All of that stuff was [director] Steve Moramarco’s idea. I wanted to put myself in the hands of the artist and do something really collaborative. I was working with Steve for years in The Abe Lincoln Story, and I think he has a really unique vision, and he also has a sense of humor that’s less…ethereal than mine, let’s say.

“Hey Little Jesus” is a very old song from the Swinging Madisons; I did pick and choose songs from my back catalog that hadn’t been given the recorded treatment that I would like to have had them have that I thought might fit into the arc of the story. It was written simply for an Easter show at the Nut Club, and if you scrutinize those lyrics there really isn’t any depth to them at all, except for that I’m trying to be ridiculous –– you know, that sort of confluence of Easter celebrations which are kind of pagan, and Easter itself, you know, Jesus, the corpse rises out of that hole like a zombie.

So it was just a very jokey thing and not particularly anti-religious –– and I like the bass figure. But the resonance it had over the course of my life –– first of all, audiences always go crazy for it, just ‘cause I guess it rocks and it’s ridiculous. But the Swinging Madisons’ version of it had already been on The 700 Club –– twice –– where it was called “Satan’s music.” And then when we posted the video, there were all these people that responded to it, that were my Facebook friends, and I had no idea they were Christian, even though on my Facebook information it says “Get your Jesus cooties off me,” and there I’m kind of joking because I do come from a Quaker background so I do believe in some Christian precepts.

But all these Christian people wrote me and said how disappointed they were in me, that I had no understanding and all this kind of stuff, and I said, you know, I bet Jesus could take a joke. Now, I would like to believe that that song has a lot of depth, and I do think it pokes fun at organized religions to some extent, but it really isn’t one of my deeper lyrical statements. It’s more about inference and tone.

“A love song, a hate song, a political song, a song about God, a this or that song –– I’ve used up a lot of those songs in my life’s tube of toothpaste of songs.”

Does the Quaker background loom large in your story?

It doesn’t figure in my psychology in the way that I practice any particular religion, in fact I’m pretty staunchly anti-organized religion. But that said, I was lucky enough to be raised in the Quaker faith, and the more as an adult I became aware of how religion works, it’s the one that’s actually practical. Their precepts are basically: Be nice, try not to hurt anybody, don’t kill anybody, we don’t believe in churches and we don’t believe in preachers. And also they go out and do good work; when I was in high school my parents were much hipper than I was, and they were always making peace marches and having peace vigils, going to protest the nuclear reactors and all that stuff, and all the other kids I knew were rebelling against their parents; the high school kids were all coming over to my house to hang out with my parents. [laughs]

I’m proud of my Quaker background, and it has helped me keep my thought processes clear at certain times. When Nixon was saying he was a Quaker, there was a whole lot of talk among the Quaker community about whether they should disassociate themselves from him because he was such a warmonger. Quakers won’t go to war. They would rather go to prison than go to war. And the sense in the Quaker community was, You don’t punish the man because he’s lost.

And that’s a very simple line I’ve take to my life that helps me look at people who I believe are monsters and try and find why they behave the way they do. What could possibly make a human being who’s probably born with a certain amount of empathy lose it all over the course of their life?

You don’t strike me as a particularly mean person.

Because I come from a punk background, I know about being a student of outrage, and I know about saying I hate you! or Fuck you! to get a rise out of people. [laughs]

In the song “Evil,” you’re obliquely addressing things, but you’re pretty direct, too. What is the face of evil?

That song came out of the Bush era, and I just looked at him, and every word that came out of his mouth was not only a lie, and not only bent on making life more unpleasant for those of us who could least afford having their lives be more unpleasant, but it was also idiotic. You know, when you look at old movies, the devil’s always the smart one that tricks people into stuff, and here’s the devil of vacancy, of intellectual vacancy.

So for that whole eight years my boyfriend and I were seriously considering renouncing our American citizenship and moving to Prague –– you know, that’s the kind of specificity I didn’t want to have in that song, but our mindset at the time was, we were so horrified at the tenor of what it meant to be an American, and how radically that had changed, and how you weren’t allowed to question anything. The way I looked at Bush was in direct response to that Quaker teaching that there is God in every man, and if you look deep enough you’ll find the light. Well, I wanted to look into George Bush and find the light. You know, he’s a small, petty individual, he had a poor education, he was allowed to get away with a lot of stuff, he was obviously put into the position of power, as a puppet, a position that didn’t ask him to exercise any of his humanity when he was there.

But I couldn’t find the light. I just couldn’t see how this person could be the most powerful person on Earth and be so unkind and not even give any consideration to the world he’s leaving to his children. And that’s what that song came out of. I'm asking, Is there evil in the world? I was raised to believe there isn’t. That’s a question, I hope.

On a related note, just looking around on the Internet can help one fully get the picture about the sheer dumb banality of evil. The variety of pure hatred you see online is really grim. Shocking, actually.

It’s casual vitriol that’s completely unearned; these people draw these conclusions based on no research or any discernible logic, and yet they’re so ready to be angry about something, and not look for solutions. And in contrast –– I mean, I’m a child of privilege, I was raised in Santa Barbara, and I was also raised in the ‘60s, when the U.S. was at its economic peak and universities were free. So I was raised at a moment in American history when intellect was actually valued, and I felt that discourse was actually about something. And now it doesn’t seem like it’s discourse, it’s just…fighting. The bar has been so lowered. Shouldn’t we expect more of each other?

But let’s get back to the album, shall we? Like I said, these songs seem to involve a lot of sweating over details, in the composing, in the production, and in the lyrics. What’s your process?

It used to be that the lyrics and music arrived at the same time, and sometimes there were lyrics first. It’s really different now. I am an artist ­­–– I’m using air-quotes there; I hope people perceive me as an artist, I don’t want to be self-aggrandizing…but maybe I do, ‘cause I’m a fop! [laughs] But I am also a craftsperson, and I don’t think craft is a dirty word. I like to really pay attention to other songwriters to see what they do that I can learn from.

And so there is a lot of scrutiny in my lyrics. You know, when you’re a kid you line up all these things: a love song, a hate song, a political song, a song about God, a this or that song, and I’ve used up a lot of those songs in my life’s tube of toothpaste of songs. Now I want to look and see, if I happen to be touching on a subject that I’ve touched on before in my catalog, am I bringing something new to it? And I also want to reflect on the experience of my journey since whatever songs I’ve written before. So sometimes there’ll be things where I say, God, I’ve said that before, and then maybe I’ll use it if it’s clever or funny or more succinct or shows some other perspective.

But when you say the album is very highly arranged, well, that’s very natural to me. I just like lots of little parts, and I think I’m good at it. And I like wordplay, it’s easy for me, and kind of therapeutic; I like to check on the rhymes, see if there’s an inner rhyme, if there’s a word in the second verse that I can actually have reflected in the third verse; it’s fun for me to do that, so it isn’t a painful process.

This kind of music is not done too much anymore. One might wonder where its roots lie…

It’s very easy to place my music, and I try to place it in the footsteps of the people I admire and idolize. It’s funny, because, in that review where the writer said the album was too pretty, he went on and on about how highly crafted it was, and then he said, “But I find it impossible to describe,” and then someone commented on Facebook, “Well, look at ‘60s and ‘70s baroque pop and psychedelia, and look at Sparks and look at ‘70s singer-songwriters.”

I think what I’m aspiring to do is patently obvious, I want to do something that’s in the realm of the Beatles and Kinks and Sparks, when I feel like songcraft was at its height in my generation. I also do study songs by Rodgers & Hart and Cole Porter and Gershwin; I look at their songs as ways to expand the horizons of what I’m attempting to do. I always try and challenge myself to make something bigger or more opulent or more intimate or more heartbreaking than I have done before.

The one tempering thing is how influential Kate & Anna McGarrigle are; “Blackpool Lights” is a very Kate & Anna McGarrigle song, like I tried to get down into this sense of innocence that they could access so easily but for me is a struggle. They would make themselves emotionally naked. I really like that when other people do it. I’m not very good at it. But I aspire toward it.

Do you think about who your audience is? Or is that a dangerous thing to do?

Of course. To me, music in the best of all possible worlds would not be a monolog, it would be a dialog; it would be something you’d share with people. I hope that my music would serve the way other people’s music has served in my life, which is to make me entertained, to make me laugh, to sound great when I’m having dinner, to pay a little bit closer scrutiny when I look at the lyrics so I would go a-ha! and feel like, Oh, that’s a clever couplet. Or it might even make me see something in a new way.

The way my generation listened to music, it made communities: It made communities from the Beatles right straight through punk. Punk invented a community where you were all together making art and sharing each other’s art and talking about each other’s art. I hope that my music would serve that purpose in some people’s lives; I don’t flatter myself that I’m particularly relevant to anything anymore…though I would like to be relevant! [laughs]

But the way that people listen to music now, and what it means in their lives, I don’t know if it’s more wallpaper now, or if music is the clothes they wear to the mall. Whereas to me, music and the community of music and art, that's my life! But I don’t know if I have an audience.

You know, here was my assumption as a youngster: I thought I might be able to carve out a niche for myself as big as perhaps Sparks, you know, where I could make a new record and have it financed and live in relative comfort till the next record. So far that hasn’t really happened. [laughs] It would be nice! But I think you just struggle from job to job and try to make the most beautiful thing you possibly can while you’re doing it.