“Well, I'm a Southerner of course, so this appeals to me from that perspective right off the bat. I love the sentiment of the song and what it conveys, the melody of it and everything. It's so unique. I don't know any other song that talks about Southern accents and I just love what it says about “Everything is done / with a southern accent where I come from.” I love that line.

“It's real emotional to me and it's hard not to get choked up every time I'd hear it, because I think about Tom Petty and now he's not here. I feel a real connection with it. The last time we played with Tom [September 25, 2017] was the last show he ever did, when we opened up for him at the Hollywood Bowl, and then he was gone a few days later. The whole experience was pretty heavy and it will never leave me.

“I actually learned about that song from his other song “Rebels,” which is another song about Southern roots and where you're from. Tom was really tied to that, and I am too. That's part of what I loved about him.”

“My husband Tom turned me on to Atmosphere, he knows him from Minneapolis because he’s from there. I mean, I've always listened to concert music and everything, but this was the first album I'd heard of his, and I listened to the lyrics and I read the lyrics. Lyrics are important to me.

“I loved what Slug was doing musically, because it was kind of a... I don't know what you want to call it. I hate labels, because as soon as you say it's a particular thing people think “Oh, his stuff is really different.’ I mean, I guess you'd call it hip-hop or whatever, but it's got that element to it. His writing is so poetic. It's really, really good. He's a great writer and that's the thing that really struck me.

“That whole album Southsiders is just great from start to finish. This song really struck me and Tom explained the song was written about Slug’s friend [Micheal “Eyedea” Larsenhe] that he worked with, who died unexpectedly. The hook is “One little flicker of light / can erase the dark.” I just thought, ‘Wow, what a great concept.’

“The thing I liked about his writing is that he writes really sensitive songs like that. I remember one time I was on the tour bus and I was in the back, listening to this album. My guitar tech came back there and he goes, ‘Oh, what are you listening to?’ I said, ‘It's Atmosphere.’ He goes, "Well, I don't really like hip-hop and rap and that stuff. It's all so angry.’ I said, ‘Well, that's not what this is like.’ He goes, ‘Oh, well I'll have to listen to it then.’

“I think it's kind of the blues of today to me. I love the music part of it too. I think it's really tied in with James Brown. It's all connected.”

“I talk about this all the time. I talk about it in almost every interview I've ever done about everything, because it was the first Bob Dylan album I ever heard. So again, it was the album, and no pun intended, but we revisit that album a lot and that song, because now, doing interviews for my album, everybody keeps asking me about the Biblical references. I started quoting one of the lines from this particular song, “Highway 61 Revisited,” where Dylan goes "God said to Abraham, 'Kill me a son,' and Abe said, 'Man, you must be putting me on.'" I've been using that as an example of referencing Biblical stuff in a song.

“Not just that song, but that whole album was a big turning point in my life. When I heard that one I was like 12 and a half years old. I didn't quite understand it all at the time, but with his stuff back then it was hard for anybody to understand a lot of it, because it was steeped in all this mystery and everything. That certainly turned my little 12-year old head around.

“The thing is I’d come from two worlds. To me, that album blends together the literary world and the traditional folk world, both of which I came out of. At that time, I was listening to Woody Guthrie songs, playing Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and traditional folk songs. Of course, with my Dad [Miller Williams] being a poet and that whole literary world, when I heard this album it was like those two worlds came together.

“Well, it's funny that the way I heard that album was this student of my Dad's - a young poet - came over to the house with a copy of it. Back then when a new album came out like that it was a big thing - ‘The new Bob Dylan album is out!’ - and he brought it over to the house. My Dad wasn't really into Bob Dylan all that much, but the guy went into my Dad's office for them to have a meeting and he left the album out in the living room. And so I put it on the turntable. This was 1965 and I put it on the turntable and it blew my 12-year old mind.

“I can remember my Dad's creative writing students; I remember a lot of times hearing them debating about whether Bob Dylan was a poet or a songwriter. The younger writers would say, "He's a poet, he's a poet." And my dad would say, "No, he's not a poet, he's a songwriter. There's a difference." I remember that.”

“She was another one who was a big discovery. I mean, she was one of the few - and you could probably count them on one hand - Delta blues women who played guitar and wrote her own songs. That was highly unusual.

“I don't know if you've read anything about her, but she hung out with all these other blues guys and she was apparently kind of a ball of fire. They’d tried to mess with her, and she'd throw a whisky in their face or whatever and spit on the floor. She was pretty tough apparently, because she had to be.

“I recorded one of her songs too, on that Folkways album. She was a big inspiration for me, and this was another one where it was like, ‘Well, which song is it going to be?’ But that's one that I do.”

“Oh God, Are We There is a great album, start to finish. I put it on and I was listening to it, and I'm like, “God, which song am I going to pick?” and “Your Love is Killing Me” in particular kind of stood out.

“The lyrics are so good, "Break my legs so I won't walk to you / Cut my tongue so I can't talk to you / Burn my skin so I can't feel you / Stab my eyes so I can't see.” I just thought, ‘God, that's really good, really good songwriting.’ I love her voice on it. I love the way it's recorded, just the whole thing. Then I got to meet her, Tom and I met her and she's really sweet and really cool. So yeah, I was really impressed with her songwriting and everything.

“To be honest, I don't get impressed with that much [modern music] stuff, really. So when something stands out like this, I get really excited about it, like, ‘Wow, this is really good! I'm impressed.’”

Good Souls, Better Angels is out now