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Michelle Shocked has a pretty high goal in her life.

“I want to change the world,” she said during a phone interview from her home in Los Angeles. “I’m not kidding. I have some things I want to do, and that is one of them.”

Shocked will play the Zephyr Club, 301 S. West Temple, on Wednesday, June 14. Doors open at 7 p.m.

Aside from changing the world, Shocked wants to unify society by taking on political issues through her music. “I would like to spend time addressing our ‘separate-but-equal’ idealism that has been with our culture from Day One. While we have been doing better legislating laws that are supposed to abolish that mentality, we don’t carry out those laws. If you ask me, I think we’re more segregated in ideals than we ever have been.”

Shocked isn’t a person to hold back her political views. The outspoken singer-songwriter has always let her fans and public know what was on her mind. Back in 1984, she was arrested during a fair-housing protest at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. The photo of her arrest appeared on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner and later found its way to her Grammy Award-nominated 1988 album, Short Sharp Shocked.

And in 1994, Shocked filed a $1 million lawsuit against her former label, PolyGram/Mercury over her right to release new music. Shocked—born Karen Michelle Johnston, the daughter of carpenter/mandolinist “Dollar" Bill Johnston – fought the good fight and emerged victorious.

“It was easy for both sides to agree with the contract when it was in writing, but when it came to carrying out the agreement, it was hard,” Shocked said. “The label literally put my career in limbo. I wasn’t allowed to write or record any music unless they liked it. And I couldn’t release any music independently.”

Since winning her court battle with the label, Shocked has started to develop a plan to rerelease her back catalogue – which includes the albums, Short Sharp Shocked, Captain Swing and Arkansas Traveler – her own way.

“I looked at the albums as a trilogy,” she said. “After I released Short Sharp Shocked, I had a lot of ideas that I wanted to pursue with the other albums. And I wanted to wait until all three were released before I did anything else because, frankly, all three albums are so stylistically diverse. And that was hard on the label. They didn’t know how to categorize me.”

Shocked has recorded songs with punk band MDC, bluegrass princess Alison Krauss, and Hothouse Flowers’ Fiachna Ó Braonáin. “My musical influences are very diverse and many. I grew up with my mom and stepfather and ran away to live with my real father when I was 15.

“He had some albums by Leadbelly [sic], Lightning Hopkins, Guy Clark, and Janis Ian. My mom (whom Shocked would not name), when I lived there, didn’t have very much secular music in the house.”

Shocked’s first break came during a campfire jam at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas, back in 1986. Peter Lawrence, who worked at the British independent label, Cooking Vinyl Records, caught some of the songs while recording with his Sony Walkman. The album would consequently be called, The Texas Campfire Tapes.

“The next thing I knew, I got a call from them, and they told me my album was No. 26 on the independent charts, and they wanted me to come to Europe to play,” she said.

From her arrest in San Francisco to the legal hassles with her former label to an overseas assault and a stint in a mental institution, Shocked could have closed down shop and lived the remainder of her life a very bitter person. But something changed her attitude – her husband Bart Bull, a writer whom she met in 1989.

“He oozes with self-confidence, and that has helped me immensely,” said Shocked. “And I think I’ve found my own confidence, something that I didn’t have for a good part of my life. I have a great marriage, and that has been very inspiring to me.”