Describe the women who have most influenced your life and the formation of your character.

My mother was a major musical encouragement. She got me going musically. My parents divorced pretty early, when I was seven. I was overjoyed when they told me they were getting divorced because they were fighting all the time and I hated it. So my mom became a writer and a professor, and eventually moved to Manhattan. Now she writes for the "Science Times," and her life was on this upward trajectory around writing, science writing, and medical writing.

My father's trajectory is completely different. He's a leftist and a community organizer, so he spent 25 years of his life - basically his entire adult life - working in East New York, Brooklyn, with all the other people in this community center. It was called the United Community Centers, and was a tiny group of people in Brooklyn, who really believed in positive change - that it was going to happen with different kinds of people working together on the most basic level: like getting schools funded and stopping funds for everything else that's harmful, like arms.

Those were powerful ideas, and the people who were in that group also communicated those ideas powerfully, and raised their children up with those ideas. And also, the kids were raised, in effect, communally, because a lot of the parents were not around in a given time. I would go over to my godmother's house and hang out with those people, or my godfather's, and just hang out with different sets of people. And I was also expected to sit for other kids and raise them up.

They were basically a Stalinist cadre in Brooklyn. Sometimes it was a little bit crazy. In my cell, there were three different families. Those women were tough over there, hard core radicals, black, white and Puerto Rican. They were definitely models of strength. But they were very forceful people, modeling a lot of good things, like independence from the norm, and also a lot of bad things, like dogmatism and being really pedantic and major ideologues in that organization. They were organizers. That's what they were doing, or they ran daycare centers. They were running this tiny grassroots community center in Brooklyn by and for people who had nothing. So, they were pretty tough and committed to social change. I breathed that in growing up.

Do you consider yourself a feminist? Why or why not?

I totally dig the word and I always have, ever since I was a tiny kid. I never had any rejection of it. My mom's a hard core feminist and I am too. I think anybody who rejects it is screwed. Unless you reject it because you have issues around white women being exclusionary and so you don't want to call yourself feminist, okay, I can get behind that. Like Alice Walker using the word womanist. That's cool.

Without people before us who paved the way, there'd be no way for me to do the kind of music that I'm doing right now or be the kind of woman that I am right now. So, I'm totally proud to be a feminist. Women who paved the way before me musically, on the blues scene, back in the 20s like Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith or Memphis Minnie, who were really strong women who had solo careers and who were outspoken about their sexuality. Two of them sang about being queer and about just having flexibility about partner choice and a certain openness about that, and independence.

In the country scene, we have these masochistic type of singers but they're still, at least, articulating female desire. Like Patsy Cline or Loretta Lynn or Emmylou Harris. More recently, people like Chrissie Hynde, who kept on going even after they had kids, they were really rocking hard and they kept on going. I think that's important. They allowed their music to change and they were growing and I really respect people like that. Blondie, man, Debbie Harry, she's awesome, she's changed so much. She's evolved as a musician in a direction where she really wants to be and she permitted the growth and she kept with it. It's like triage, you know what I mean? It just sorts out people like Britney Spears who's going to be nothing in three months, from people who are serious musicians, who have something serious to say.

The other thing I wanted to say about feminism, and it's the same thing about Judaism that my music speaks to, is about its being transgressive of the individual; it is liminal. In other words, it doesn't find an individual language or a place exactly. You can look at the music through the lens of Judaism and get a lot from that lens. I think that's the same thing with feminism. You don't have to be a feminist to listen to my music but there are a lot of ways that feminists - that feminism - has informed my music, aside from making it possible for a woman to work alone and for her music to be taken seriously. Which is not something that would have been possible in other ages, and it's the feminist movement that made that possible.

There's also theoretical feminism. The idea of embracing multiplicity instead of individuality. The idea of working with different kinds of collaboration, that is transgressive. Ideas about gender and playing with gender: how language can be a tool for that, how subverting language is a way of subverting huge ideas about gender and oppressive structures around gender. That's something that we play with in the musical language and also in the actual lyrics of the music that my band Charming Hostess makes. Feminism has offered us a theoretical structure for play. That's also something that's been important about feminism for us.

What would you most like to tell your daughter, son, the next generation about your hopes for women of the future? How would you advise a young woman to go about finding her own voice?

No one should get cosmetic surgery under any circumstances. (laughs)

I don't know if this has to do with being a woman. One of my greatest music teachers at Berkeley said, "If you feel like you have a choice being here or not, being a musician or not, if you feel like you have a choice, leave. It's only if you feel like you're driven here by desperation that you stay. " I think that's really good advice. If you don't feel like you have to do it, then don't. And also, a reality check with other people. I've met a lot of people who say, "This is my dream, man." And I don't really think that everyone should follow their dream because a lot of people suck. So, check out that your dream is actually worth following with other people who you know, that you can articulate it in some way, like, "My dream is real and it's good." Or is it a dream like, "I really want to make a lot of money." Then you should take your dreams somewhere else. Nobody needs more of that.

How do you define success for yourself? How would you define success for the next generation?

To make a living. To make a living. Right now the band's not making a living, so it's a moderate local success. Our original order for CDs was 1,000. We sold them immediately and we got another thousand, sold 'em, another thousand, sold 'em. We just ordered another couple thousand. We're so cautious. It's such a small amount. But for a local band it's pretty good to sell 3,000 CDs. We're not on a label; we're doing everything independently. We haven't hired anyone to do anything for us. We have no publicist or anything like that. So, for a word of mouth band, that's pretty good.

It'd be great to have a good publicist. It'd be great to have someone who could book shows instead of us booking shows, especially for touring. We've toured in some places because it was cool to do them, like the Knitting Factory, or the Klezmer Festival in New York, The Michigan Women's Music Festival. All these things are marks of, "That's good that we can do that." To have well-attended shows at good venues around here, like the Great American Music Hall, that's good. We can do that. So, we're definitely more successful than we have been and it seems like it's increasing.

Right now we got a commission from John Zorn to do a trio record for his label called Tzadik. That's a good thing. All these things are signs of recognition, but for me, the main thing is to just keep putting out new things. Our next CD will be out in January, I think, and then the trio CD will come out soon after that, probably in March. So, I guess for me right now, success is basically making a living off the music. I wouldn't quit the cantorial work I also do, but I could definitely spend more time just doing the business end of Charming Hostess because the business side is almost overwhelming to me.

What made you decide to pursue a non-traditional occupation?

I was like most kids growing up, and I grew up singing. I always wanted to sing, ever since I was a little kid, and I always did sing. My mom said one of her memories of me at my youngest was when I was around three. I would run around naked, listening to the Magic Flute and singing all the arias. She said when I was three, I could do them exactly, and she was amazed. But that was my favorite thing and my mom took me to the opera all the time, whenever she could, and if it was going to be scary, something like Mephistopheles, we would leave before the end so I wouldn't be scared or have any bad experiences of the opera. And if there were any movies that came out about opera, we would go to those, certainly.

My mother encouraged me in a lot of ways, like listening to a lot of classical music, even from a very early age. And she herself is a pianist and a musician, who really gave that up - thought of herself, I think, as having a professional piano career, but gave it up, because she didn't have any money. She was a poor woman from the South, and she didn't have a safety net. So, she ended up being a writer, which also doesn't have much of a safety net, but she's also a professor.

And also, my father's side - he's a socialist, and he's an internationalist. I grew up with a lot of music from around the world, from that side of the family. For my whole life on my father's side, I listened to a lot of music from a lot of different cultures. That was seen as an important way for different kinds of people to learn about each other, was through music, also through dancing, of different dances from around the world.

From a very young age, I got used to a lot of music from Eastern Europe, from North Africa, from all over the place, aside from the kind of music that everyone else in America was listening to, that I also listened to. Who doesn't want to sing it, and who doesn't want to be a part of it? Everybody does. When I was little, I didn't think, "I want to be in a rock band," but I just loved to sing.

I wasn't sure, actually, what I was going to do, and I'm from Brooklyn, as I said before. I came out to California to go to Berkeley, because I was mostly attracted by this one professor there, this guy named Larry Levine, who wrote this book called Black Culture, Black Consciousness. And I was thought this guy's smart, he really writes about this idea of a syncretic culture, about how black and white cultures grew up together in the South, and how they influenced each other, the idea that there is no individual culture. He was acknowledging this idea of appropriation, but also acknowledging the idea of syncretic growth, and that was a very powerful idea for me. So, I came out here to check this guy out.

And I'm glad I did. I ended up going to Berkeley, and studying with him and a lot of other people. I studied history, and I studied music at Berkeley. I thought I would be an academic. When I was younger I thought I would be a labor lawyer, or a civil rights lawyer, or some other kind of lawyer, because I always had an aptitude for argument. But I didn't really have an idea of what I was going to do specifically.

But when I got out here, I started singing with two other women, and we did women events. We performed at the Women's Studies graduation, and sang at Mama Bears. We did a lot of different kinds of traditional musics, a lot that I had grown up with, from Eastern Europe, from North Africa, from America, both black and white, and then some original stuff, too.

And for fun, we ended up collaborating with this other band called Idiot Flesh. We all lived together in this big anarchist co-op, Barrington, and we ended up collaborating with them. I was in the music department with those guys. It was super fun, and I thought, wow, I'm in a rock band. I thought I was in like this women's folk singing group, but really, I'm in this rock band.

Then in 1990, we ended up traveling all over in Eastern Europe. We went to Romania and to Bulgaria, and Hungary, and Poland. I got a lot of music in all those different places. I bought and taped a lot. And then, I went to Israel for a year, and I got more music, and went to Egypt, and I got more music. So, when I finally came back, I wanted to incorporate what I'd been listening to. So, when I came back I had a lot of music and I had had a lot of experiences, and I thought, it's fun to sing with three women but I want to also have the power of a rock band. We did a permanent splice between the three women and the rock band and it became Charming Hostess.

What challenges have you dealt with at work or at home due to your gender? What benefits?

I don't think I'm at a place in this business where I'm fighting battles, because that's not really where I am. I'm not saying that to appease anybody but just because I happen to be pretty lucky. I'm in the center of this East Bay music scene where there's a lot of strong, great bands that have women in them or are fronted by women, like the bands: 9 Wood, Peach Fish, Ramona the Pest, Dawn McCarthy, and Tin Hat Trio.

I don't feel like people take me less seriously or disrespect me because I'm a woman. There's a lot that we can do because we're women, but for me it's a benefit because I'm into women-only spaces. In the larger world, one thing that I think is gonna be an issue is, our band is really cute, you know? We have cute girls and cute boys in our band but it's definitely not like, "Hi, I'm a sexy girl band, nah nah nah". So, I think there's an expectation of that when there's women in the band. What we do with our music is acknowledging women's sexuality and desire. I think articulating those things is important and empowering, instead of songs like "I love him, oooh."

There's this constant, circular thing. We're articulating and subverting, and then we're ironizing; Articulate. Ironize, you know what I mean? I'm not sure if that's harder because we're women or that's harder because we're thinking and that's not what's going to be generally popular in music: ambitious, thoughtful bands.

What woman (living or dead) would you most like to have dinner with and why?

Laurie Anderson, man. She's amazing. She would be someone I'd really be into meeting because she's just had such an interesting body of work for such a long time. Her work is important and it's influential to me and to many other people. So, I would love to meet Laurie Anderson and just pump her brain a little bit and see what she's up to and what she thinks about.

There's another woman named Iva Bittova, a Czech violinist and singer who is also influential and important to me. I'd like to meet her. She supposedly has heard and likes our band. She came here around 10 years ago. Somebody I know brought her here for a little bit and it was amazing to hear her. Then when I went the Czech Republic, I bought her other albums, and she's since been back here.

There are a lot of other amazing, strong singers that I'd love to meet, like Mavis Staples. She might be able to speak to me because she's a gospel singer has some spiritual teaching for me. I'd like to meet some dead people. There are a lot of women who were destructive. They got taken down by multiple pressures, like Billie Holiday, who got taken down by the pressures of being black in a place where white people ruled and, by being a woman in a place where men ruled. So I'd like to ask her what it was like for her and what kind of pressure she was under.