Ani DiFranco's music reminds a lot of people of a certain age and era: cigarettes, coffee shops, dorm rooms, Doc Martens. Not that she's changed radically. “Sometimes, though, it depresses me to hear people say, 'Oh, how I loved your music in the '90s' or 'you got me through high school.' Sure, that's nice, but I haven't stopped making records since then, and in fact my latest songs are some of my best,” says the folksinger who released her 23rd album in May, titled Unprecedented Sh!t. «I'm not the It Girl anymore, but I still have a job».
To tell the truth, she has more than one job. Aside from her new album, the second in her history that she didn't produce alone (but with BJ Burton), on Broadway she plays the part of Persephone in Hadestown by Anaïs Mitchell (it's the role she covered in the 2010 concept of the same name that she herself released on her own label, Righteous Babe Records). There's a new documentary, 1-800-ON-HER-OWNabout his career that was presented at the Tribeca Film Festival. His second children's book will be released in August, Show Up and Vote.
At 53, he still has energy to spare and eyes as piercing as those on the cover of his 1990 debut. No, he no longer has his hair shaved.
«Disc one, side one, the beginning of the journey. It's the song that makes me say, “I learned to play the guitar to make this.” It's the one that people care about a lot and it's emblematic of my state of mind at the time. I recorded it on tape in front of two microphones, all very simple, I was young, stupid and arrogant, and I didn't think too much about things. I remember the window where I was looking out at the street when I wrote it, it looked out onto Eleventh between First and A, I lived there. I would sit at the window and the boy across the street would blow soap bubbles. I remember the scene perfectly, me sitting there with the bubbles flying down the street».
«In the world of folk and left-wing lesbians I frequented, it was normal for there to be sign language interpreters at concerts. It was fun to talk to them before starting. They would ask me the meaning of the songs and then interpret them on stage. I remember one day one of them asked me if the song had a sexual connotation. And I was like, “Well, yes, of course.” She asked me the same question for all the songs on the setlist and my answer was always the same: “Well, yes, of course.”
“That was the one that started me getting out of my narrow folk circle. There was something strange about this song with no chorus and a five-minute outro of drums. But in the end, why not? At the time, it seemed very alternative. Andy Stochansky and I made an eight-bar drum loop, it seemed exciting and we used it, so the loop is in the song, not his drums.”
“I remember I was starting to get more space as a musician out there and so I was bumping into the culture of competition, especially among women, especially in a world where there can only ever be one girl on the bill. It's the patriarchy's way of making us compete with each other for scraps, and that drives me nuts. I wanted allies and instead I got saboteurs. It's about that too.”
«After six years of touring in a minivan with Andy, he arrived Dilate and I started to get noticed in the mainstream, but I didn't have any great means. I hired a third party (Andrew Gilchrist, nicknamed Goat, ed.) who was a jack-of-all-trades, sound engineer, crew, road manager. We fell in love and it was a real mess because he had a girlfriend he was living with and I had what I had. That's why many songs on that album, including Untouchable Facethey're about forbidden love, I was living it. I remember we were on tour in Toronto when we wrote the song, and I played it and my sound guy's girlfriend was in the audience. She said, 'That's the exact vibe I get here.' It was my way of revealing the story. In hindsight, I apologize to her. I should never have hidden behind my art.”
«The album Little Plastic Castle that's what I got to know. As Is I recorded it in one or two takes live the day I got a '69 Mustang Cobra Turbojet 428 that I had fallen in love with. The popularity of Little Plastic Castle It was both a blessing and a curse. Me and Goat were learning how to make records and we made a decent one that was a little less raw than the previous ones, so people started saying, there you go, she sold out, I knew it. I was also putting more effort into my makeup and clothes. Andy and Sarah Lee, my bandmates, started wearing makeup and I started wearing makeup with them. It was a big backlash for my revolutionary, pandering subculture. It hurt a little, but oh well. It wasn't bad to be legitimized by the powers that be.”
“Fast forward a few years, my marriage to Goat is falling apart, and my life is falling apart. I've been fighting without ever leaving the public eye, unfortunately. I've been fighting in the public eye, which is even worse. But some of those songs mean something to people who are fighting and Grey It's one of them, it refers to that period in which I was deconstructing and rebuilding myself as a human being.”
“I chose it from that record mostly because of Sekou Sundiata, who was my poetry teacher at the New School in New York, my friend and mentor, a special person who passed away. He loved this piece. I went to a show he wrote called Blessing the Boatsthe title is taken from a poem by Lucille Clifton, a poet I had introduced him to. Someone started singing Grey. Even at his commemoration someone intoned Greyso this song makes me think of him.”
«We arrive at Red Letter Year. At that point I met my second and last husband (Mike Napolitano, ed.), who is also a fantastic producer. It's the beginning of my modern recordings, the era I'm in today. I'm surrounded by enough tough people that I can't make any mistakes. Red Letter Year It sounds great because Nappy recorded and mixed it. There are songs with a string section arranged by Todd Sickafoose. It's funny, now I do Hadestown every night on stage and Todd, of course, won a Tony Award for his arrangements for that show. I introduced him to Anaïs. Two of the women in the band, Marika Hughes and Megan Gould, play in To Tomso it's like all these circles are intertwined in my life and in my community. This song represents the beginning of the life I live today.”
“This song is a challenge. I composed it for a play that may not be performed, so it's written from the point of view of a particular character. But it's obvious that when you write about someone, you always end up writing about yourself. The character here is a lawyer who's tough at work, but who can't say what she needs to say to the person she's married to or who has trouble talking face to face. She can use words to free people from afar, but how can you make yourself heard if you've forgotten to speak? You have to make yourself heard if you want to be heard and if you want to stay whole.”
From Rolling Stone US.
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM