"Since I've been in the public eye, people treat me differently, like I'mbetter than they are. It's so unbalanced and it bugs me. I'm getting to the point where I want to slap people. This isn't a TV show. This isn't Days of Our Fucking Lives. People seem to have a very dramatic, unrealistic idea of what it means to be in the public eye, that it somehow makes someone more valid than other people. People are constantly telling me I'm smart and more together than everyone else. Which is bullshit. Without the women friends I have in my life, I would be either more confused than I already am, or dead."

She picks up an apple and stares at it a few moments before chomping down with all her formidable Taurus might.

"You know, if you get out of the lame white rock scene, and like, talk to an East Indian musician or a Spanish Flamenco dancer, you see how totally ludicrous the whole "star" thing is. In many other music and dance traditions, people are consciously in touch with whatever divine power is their faith. And I'm not trying to front as some shawoman or something. It's just my approach to music. Being open to an external influence that manifests in the weather, the moon, my friends, whatever. If an individual is observant of cycles in people's behavior and their own mood changes, they pick up information. All the makings of art--of anything--are there. It's just a matter of observing, acknowledging, and communicating." She looks off to the sky and crunches into her apple. "That's what I think anyway." She shrugs and laughs, mouth full of red and white.

Most of the songs she performed at the festival were backed by loops or her very distinct, finely grooved internal rhythm. She prefers walking around the audience over being on stage. In regard to this issue, she was quite clear, "I will devise a way of playing guitar in the crowd," she announced to no one and everyone. She introduced Poolog as a poem "about a friend of mine who was into heroin for many years. She quit for four or five years and an 'old friend' got her back into it. I wrote this when she was trying to quit again. She was living with me and all I could really do to help her was go and find her when she went to score and bring her back home. I called it Poolog because heroin constipates you. This song is about that."

And it was. A very powerful, painful song.

At the end, she chanted, "I would give you all the love from the base of my heart but would it help you if I tore my chest apart." I looked around me and saw I was not the only one moved to tears. Then her voice trailed away and holding her forehead in one hand and the microphone in the other, she cried.