Like LIVING IN CLIP, the new album marks the end of an era, since you’re no longer performing live with the players from SO MUCH SHOUTING…

When I first gathered the horn section, there was a constant sense of energy and movement; we were collectively creating all these arrangements, and there was always a new song, or a new arrangement of an old song. It was a thrill for me to be learning from other musicians and from working with new instruments. Then there was the experience of being a bandleader, which is a whole other bag of donuts; in order to keep six people improvising well together, somebody has to be leading it, and I was very inspired by that job. Now I’ve decided to go solo and conserve a little energy and refocus. But I love my band so much, and I’m very sad that this is kind of a posthumous album for a band that will no longer be.

How did you select which songs and which recordings of them to include on the new album?

Certain evenings are represented heavily, because they were the ones I went to out of memory. There are two or three tracks from Boise and Philadelphia, and a few from LA and Phoenix. There was so much mayhem in the recording process that I gave up very quickly on the notion of finding perfect versions of any of these songs; there’s no such thing on tape, let alone in my mind. The performances are ‘flawed,’ certainly, but my mission became simply to find technically passable tapes from nights I remember enjoying, listen to the songs I was interested in representing, and then ask myself the question, ‘Is the spirit here?’ That’s what I most wanted to document: the interaction among the musicians, and between the musicians and the audience.

LIVING IN CLIP has a distinct beginning, middle and end, but the new album is organized somewhat differently. How did you arrive at the order of the songs?

In terms of structuring the record, I mixed very quickly; I would mix one, two, three songs a day, and I would either leave some talking before a song to make it feel more natural, or I would leave none. Usually I left none, because there was so much music, and when I’m performing with the band I don’t do as much talking. Sometimes I would fade out the applause at the end, because I was sick of hearing screaming. I was sort of at the mercy of my own whim when I was compiling the records, because [I'd discover that] this one ends like this and this one begins like this, and how do I put those next to each other? I kept going over the possibilities for the albums to flow in and out of themselves and one into the other, and I ended up with two discs, “STRAY CATS” and “GIRLS SINGING NIGHT.” The titles come literally out of little bits of conversation I left on the records. On the first one there are a lot of references to cats [for instance]. The first record is less linear, too; it doesn’t begin with “hey, everybody, welcome” and it doesn’t end with “thanks a lot for coming, bye.” I began to conceive of the songs on it as stray cats that are finding homes on this album. It very much begins in the middle; on the first track you’re plopped into this little bar in Nantes, France, where I’m wrestling with my guitar sound. The second record is more like a show. The title “GIRLS SINGING NIGHT,” comes from a joke I was making with Julie at the time, two feminists poking fun at the stereotype of ourselves as humorless and self-righteous. We were also performing a lot of duets together, and I guess I included some of my more classic feminist songs on that second disc, too.

You recently released a live DVD, RENDER. What’s the connection between that project and this one?

The live album took so long because I was working on that movie; it just ate my head for a year. There’s only one track on the album that also appears in the movie. There were originally going to be more; I thought that the projects would be released in tandem and that they would be more related to each other, but as it turns out, making a movie is even more work than making two records, and to do all of those things together was just impossible. I ended up feeling that the projects were not so connected that they would have a lot of overlapping material, so I [kept] just the one song, “Dilate,” in both, but in the movie I stop in the middle and scold the audience for being so loud and disruptive, and then on the record I edited out the interruption. It’s my last laugh, so to speak - that through the magic of tape editing I could make room for the song that I didn’t feel was there in the moment. The other connection to the movie is that when I was filmed in the studio in Texas, I was mixing the track “Loom” for the live album. It’s kind of a mirror in a mirror: here’s the record I was trying to get finished while so much of my time was being usurped by that moviemaking saga.

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GIRLS SINGING NIGHT begins with the pre-show broadcast of a spoken-word track from one of your collaborations with Utah Phillips, FELLOW WORKERS, in which he’s quoting a famous speech by one of the leaders of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.

That was taken from a particular night in LA. You hear Utah’s voice, you get a feel for the room, and then we walk out onstage to play “Ain’t That The Way.” I was using that recording before the first song of the night because I love Mario Savio’s sentiment: that it’s so easy to be complicit in our society, and unless you are free you must throw your body against the gears and try to stop the machine in whatever way you can. It’s such an eloquent expression of the whole reason that I’m out there and I’m dragging all these other people around with me. We’re setting ourselves to that task of trying to create an alternative to the destructive Machine, whether it be the music industry or capitalism [in general].

You performed the song/poem “Self-Evident” as a work in progress for most of the last year, adding and changing lines and musical elements from night to night - you don’t often do that, do you?

That was more of a public process than usual because of my urgency to speak to the political climate around us all in those early days last fall. We went on tour in September, when everyone else was cancelling tours, and there was a palpable energy everywhere I went, everyone thinking of the same thing, searching for alternative voices beyond the TV propaganda and the deflating messages from the powers that be. So I began speaking that poem before I’d memorized it, before I’d even finished writing it. I was reading onstage, which is something I almost never do, because I couldn’t travel around in this climate and work on it privately any longer. I felt that since this was something we were all working on together as a nation, I could be a little less introverted with my process. But it wasn’t until I performed it at Carnegie Hall last April that I felt it was finished. I don’t think I’ve ever had as clear a finishing moment for a song; there was something very ritualized for me about going back to New York, where I was on September 11, and bearing witness before all of the other witnesses. It was one of the most profound experiences I’ve ever had on stage; I launched into it because there it was on my set list, and about 3 seconds in, panic just hit me, like how dare I? Who knows who these people in this audience are, what happened to them that day, or whom they lost? And sure enough, halfway through I could hear sobbing from the back of the upper balcony in that huge, glorious, cavernous, beautiful, silent room. The emotion that I asked us all to share was extremely cathartic and terrifying - and yet empowering. I felt that night like, okay, this is done now; I’ve brought it back to where it came from and I’ve offered it to the people that know, and I apologize for whatever I got wrong or whatever innumerable things I wasn’t able to bear witness to, but here’s my offering, and if they can accept it, then I think I’ll move on.

Where does the version on the album come from?

Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the end of the spring band tour, after that performance in New York. I did it many different ways: way back in September [2001], I was performing it solo and spoken, even during the band shows. And then I heard the recording of it by Chuck D; he and some other rappers who called themselves The Impossebulls had recorded a version of what was then called “Work in Progress” and released a CD of it. He sent me the recording, and it’s all these different rappers taking different sections of the poem. We were all listening to it on the bus one night and I thought, “Well, shit! Okay, let’s do a musical version ourselves.” In the end I arrived at that very ambient and more pared-down arrangement where the band doesn’t come in ’til halfway through. My favorite thing about the recording is hearing the audience respond to what’s being said; it’s so affirming for me to realize how many of us agree on certain things that are not represented in the media. I don’t think I’m going to record that poem anymore, I won’t put it on my new [studio] album, because there’s not really a place for it, and I’m already on to other long, rambling wordy stuff. “Shrug” and “Welcome To:” will reappear in studio versions, but “Self Evident” is just of its time.

Can you say more about those other two new songs?

“Welcome To:” I put at the end of the first record almost like a theoretical bridge into the next one. As for “Shrug,” it was the first night we ever played that song on stage. I had just written it; we rehearsed it that day in sound check in Bozeman, Montana, and performed it that night.

There are also some much older songs of yours on the album, like “Gratitude” and “You Had Time.” Am I right that you didn’t perform those two for a long time?

Sure, especially “Gratitude.” “You Had Time” comes up every few years for a week or two; different songs get preferential treatment or neglect for whatever reasons. The two discs are kind of collections of standards, anchors of my more recent set lists, and then there are anomalies. “Gratitude” was a song we pulled out on the last tour and I thought, well, there’s something people don’t get to hear a lot. And “Rock Paper Scissors,” a song that I hardly ever perform at all: I included a version of Julie and me performing it as a duet; that’s something that only happened once. Then there are songs I originally recorded solo, like “Whatall is Nice,” which I wrote just before finishing REVELLING/RECKONING and included on that album in a version I recorded at home. I wanted to represent some of the arrangements that I had with this band of songs that weren’t recorded anything close to the same way in the past.

Do songs change meaning when you come back to them after awhile?

Yeah. I find that I’m often not the same person singing. I mean, the songs are there, but there’s a new person singing them. Certainly I change them musically to suit the way my ear hears now. It’s part of my mission on this live record to repent for some of my sins against my own songs. It saddens me that many of my songs that I like are only represented in recordings that I don’t like. So I’m slowly learning, as my life whizzes by me, how to sing them - maybe in a slightly calmer voice, maybe with a little bit more self-possession. I find in performance, I can really communicate my open-heartedness, and my will towards mutual respect and inclusion, but I don’t know if I’ve translated that on my records over the years. Luckily I feel, with each passing day, a little more able to communicate what has always been there in those older songs, that got a bit thwarted by recording studio trauma on their way to tape.

Interview by Ronald Ehmke