The Indigo Girls have been blending their folk sensibilities with activism since 1987 when college radio was a haven for underground musicians, men and women.

As Amy Ray and bandmate Emily Saliers move into the next millennium, “cock rock” and corporations dominate.

How do two female folk rockers hell bent on social issues keep their heads above water? The Daily caught up with Indigo Girl Amy Ray, by cell phone, on the road in the Great White North.

Your new album is a lot more electric than some past efforts; it’s even been compared to Bob Dylan’s move to electric by folk purists. Is this a new direction for Indigo Girls or an experimental phase?

It’s funny that everybody’s noticing because we really had a lot of electric stuff on our last four records, but I think that people look at this one differently because the electric stuff on this record is pretty loud and maybe produced slightly differently, which is good.

What I thought is that we’ve been trying to get the sound right, and we finally got it is as far as that goes. The acoustic stuff on this record is pretty organic, pretty acoustic like “Gone Again” and “Ozilline,” and the stuff we recorded with mandolins and banjoes I felt like the components of this record are stylistically similar to what we’ve done. It’s just the way it’s engineered and produced make it stand out a little more, so I don’t feel like it’s a huge break like we’ve been acoustic all this time and we finally went electric, because we’ve been using electric guitars for like five years now.

It does seem like folk music fans and people who pay attention to folk music are real sensitive about changes like that …

Not with us. We have some die- hard fans that are real supportive of us but they wish we’d go back and do some of the more acoustic stuff, and we will eventually because we love that stuff, too. Our audience has been pretty supportive.

So you don’t feel like your audience is trying to keep you in the late ’80s?

We wouldn’t let anybody hold us back; we’re pretty adamant about being honest to ourselves, that’s really our only obligation and our audience knows that. And I think they appreciate that they know what we do is what we mean to do. So we have a good relationship, I’d say.

When you say that being honest is what you do, in terms of activism, you guys have a lot of causes you support. Has that ever been a hindrance to your careers at all? Not a lot of other people do it. Pop music is pretty light these days for the masses.

I’d say it’s definitely a hindrance, but not so much to our audience as to the media, the press and radio especially. Mainstream rock press like Rolling Stone and Spin magazines, they don’t like the image.

That’s a bit odd considering Rolling Stone’s origins.

As a woman it’s probably harder to be political, for some reason you get a worse rap. A lot of our friends, Zack [De La Rocha] from Rage Against the Machine, Tom Morello, they’re so political and it’s almost like the reason they’re hip is because they’re political and the reason we’re not hip is because we’re political.

It’s an unfair dichotomy.

We just do it because we’re activists and that’s what we do.

Right now, Bruce Springsteen’s doing a series of concerts in New York and he’s been getting booed by his own fans when he plays “American Skin” [a song about the shooting death of Amadou Diallo by New York City Police]. Why would somebody pay to see Bruce and then boo him?

His fans have a right to boo him, I don’t think they’re booing him in general. I think they’re saying this is one song we personally don’t agree with. You take a stand when you’re on stage, and we’re gonna take a stand from the audience. I think that’s fair. I think he’s brave for doing that. I’m all the way for him doing that song as often as possible. But I also believe that your fans have a right to say when they disagree with you and express that and it just shows that his relationship is honest with his audience that they’re willing to do that. He’s got so many fans in that population, the police and the Fraternal Order of Police, and of course they’re gonna be pissed about that.

Do you think activism has killed quite a few promising careers?

I haven’t seen activism kill a career. I think when you’re an activist and a musician you do your thing and have a following. You may not be huge. We definitely have suffered from it; we’re constantly struggling against image problems with the record company and the media. I wouldn’t say it killed our career, and I don’t know anybody else that it really killed their career either.

So what kind of issues are you focusing on these days?

We’ve been doing a lot of work around this thing called the Low Power FM Radio Coalition which has really killed us with radio. There’s a ruling by the [Federal Communications Commission] that just went through where they are willing to license a certain number of new low-power, community radio stations to help bring back diversity in music and diversity in programming and more local programming.

Now the Congress keeps coming up with legislation to try to block it because the National Association of Broadcasting is huge and even [National Public Radio] is against it because everybody’s trying to protect their territory. And we’re currently planning a three-week tour for October called “Honor the Earth,” where we go out and raise awareness around Native American environmental issues. It’s about environmentalism and cultural sustainability.

In the past, musicians were leaders in youth activism. Today people talk about apathy in college students and that goes hand in hand with pop music. Even alternative musicians just talk about love and sex as much as ‘N Sync or the Backstreet Boys, and it doesn’t get much more in depth. Will something like this just go on or does the pendulum swing both ways?

It’s hard to say because now advertisers are so central to radio stations that they really gear their programming to the more mindless. It is the better as far as the advertisers are concerned, they say it fits their demographic better.

I think it’s gonna get worse before it gets better. The way it’s gonna get better is a few people are gonna hafta say this isn’t cool and we have to break the mold and play some music. Because there are a lot of people who are willing to make political music. A lot of the more underground hip-hop, alternative and folk is pretty political, that’s why it’s underground.

I’m constantly recruiting bands to play benefits and it is hard as hell to get bands to play benefits now. I have to keep going back to the same people, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, people from the ’60s and ’70s.

Do you think those guys who won’t play don’t care about issues or are they afraid it might hurt their careers a bit?

I don’t think it’s gonna hurt their career, honestly. I think they’re so busy playing a gig they’re gonna make money at they don’t want to take time to go out and do something.

Some people are scared to take a stand, but I don’t think it extends as far as “it will hurt my career,” it’s more like “what are people gonna say about me.” They’re just thinking about that and their image.

But even a band like Rage Against the Machine, they’re so political lyrically, but to get those guys to play a benefit, I mean, forget about it. It’s hard.

They do have the image that they would do a lot of benefits. They talk about issues a lot and they’re pretty openly socialist.

They’re socialist, but they’re within a complete capitalist structure.

Yeah, I get the irony. They do seem to make a lot of money out of being socialists. How do you guys pick and choose from all the issues out there, which ones you’re gonna give your time to?

We work with groups that are grass roots and the money usually goes directly to what they’re working on rather than administrative stuff, that’s our first litmus test. Then it’s issues that are relevant and timely, it’s basically your liberal combo platter.

How do you think the industry has changed for women since the late ’80s?

The late ’80s with college radio was such a fertile sort of environment for getting airplay, anybody who was slightly underground had it easier, women or men as far as radio goes.

And then women had a great spurt during that whole Lilith span when radio was really friendly to women. There’s definitely a backlash right now. Women in rock, it’s just really hard and that used to be the salt of the earth for us, basically. It probably goes in waves back and forth, but it shouldn’t be either way, it should just be that people have equal access to the airwaves — period.

For us, if we had a good underground movement going in radio, it didn’t matter whether you were a woman or a man; it was really accessible to us and as soon as radio got more commercial the fact that we were women has just held us back.