In "Serpentine" you say, "I've been around the world now/ and I can say this about America:/ The mind control is steep here/ the myopia is deep here." What do you mean by mind control in that song?

I'm not really that well traveled. I've just been a few places. I exaggerate. I form big opinions based upon small bits of knowledge. [Laughs.] One thing that is great about traveling so much is learning about where you come from. We all speak from our own perspectives, but I think the American tendency is to be very ethnocentric. I began to experience it as a kid growing up, learning history from the perspective of the elite ruling class. As I travel around, I've begun to realize that there's a way of looking at it where America is a pretty big evil empire that is trying to carry out an imperialist program in the world. And we're becoming very hated and we have very little awareness of it because we're so saturated with corporate propaganda. I keep trying to explain to people outside America, "No, we're not all evil. We're just ignorant."

And then there's the question of how the media sustains that.

Yeah, the media, of course, the corporate media, the fucking corporate whores. To turn on the TV, you're very hard-pressed to find truth in any form. It all works within this corporate superstructure that just eliminates any kind of challenging information. You know, I find in Europe that the access to information is much greater. I learn more about what America is doing when I'm in Europe than here. It's basically censorship. It was the same thing 10 years ago when we had our first Let's Devastate Iraq war. It's completely censored news, it's not news at all. But we're still not willing to cop to this. It's kind of new, I think. We have this guy in office that's trying to careen our country from a democracy to a dictatorship in a few years. And we're still in collective denial about how far it's gone.

In the unreleased poem "Grand Canyon of Light," you talk about how you love your country, that you're "indebted joyfully" to people throughout history who have "fought the government to make right." Why did you write that poem?

Well, right up until we started bombing Iraq, I was speaking out onstage a lot against the war. I just found myself sad, and then I was confronted with these audiences that were like, "Ani, speak to it, speak to it." I didn't feel I had anything useful or heroic to say, but then I found myself onstage and people kind of expected and demanded it from me. So I endeavored very purposely to write a patriotic poem. You know, I wanted to get in on the patriotic action! I was meditating on a quote by Mark Twain, "Loyalty to the country always, loyalty to the government when it deserves it." There's an essential distinction between America the country -- as in the people, the land, the culture, you know, the real America, which I love -- and the government, the ruling elite which I loathe and which is trying to destroy this place for its own aggrandizement. Of course, the big fallacy in the media -- this lying, whoring media -- is that patriotism is blindly accepting, noncritical, silently following. That's a very fascist idea, not a democratic idea of patriotism at all. So I wanted to make that distinction, in order to pave a path to a different kind of patriotism.

There's a lot of sadness and melancholy in your music right now. Can you talk about that?

Well, it's funny. I've had a couple of different conversations with friends and loved ones that know and understand what I'm trying to do and help me know and understand it. A couple of times lately people have described my work as uplifting. I'm conscious of that myself -- I think I agree with Woody Guthrie that a song should uplift. But then there's this little pause in the conversation where the person looks at me and goes, "I mean, it's not like it's happy or anything." I guess it's a kind of roundabout way of uplifting. I think that exorcising demons and giving relief to the darkness is a way of infusing it with light and overcoming it. I try to regain a little bit of personal power through confronting those things. I have noticed that through music I have made myself a stronger, more empowered, happier person, and helped other folks, maybe, along the way to be inspired or stronger in themselves. It's not necessarily through tra-la-la, but through moving from the dark places into something lighter.

You also sing about smiling. In the song "Phase," you say, "This vague little smile is my all-purpose expression/ the meaning of which I will leave to your discretion." What is it to you to smile?

I think to smile is kind of my default setting. It's my mom in me. I remember somebody on MTV describing me as "alarmingly happy," you know, in that kind of condescending way. But of course a smile doesn't always mean happy. As I'm less and less happy on a daily basis, I'm conscious of the fact that I wear this smile and it's not necessarily a happy one. So what is it and why is it there? I guess it's my way of hiding. But I also see it as part of my human duty. It's sort of like, life is hard, life is suffering. Chances are it's sucking for any given person at any given moment. And so to scowl and shrug our way through the day almost seems redundant. I see being outwardly cheerful as one of my missions. Not just thinking about the pursuit of happiness in that big way, but on a practical, daily level. But lately I've been thinking about how much of it is healthy, because to a certain point, it's also healthy to show your emotions. Am I really hurting myself by this? And is it fake? I don't want to be fake.

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