Ani DiFranco.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Folk singer - Interview

Ani DiFranco is a folk singer like none other. She doesn't strum her guitar; she attacks it. Alternately sweet and in-your-face, mellow and raucous, she has opened up folk music to a new generation. At twenty-nine, she has a huge following. Thousands of people throng to her performances, and she treats them to a fever-pitch show.

An icon to young women, she is, I believe, one of the leading forces for progressive politics in America today. She sings about women's rights, abortion rights, bisexuality; she takes on corporate power, the death penalty, gun manufacturers; she talks about poverty and racism and religion; and she mixes it all with her own quest for growth, love, observation, art, and expression.

She has put out fourteen CDs, all produced and distributed by her own company, Righteous Babe Records, which she founded when she was nineteen. She has sold two and a half million records and has been nominated for two Grammy awards. VH1 last year listed her as one of the "100 Greatest Women of Rock."

Yet, for all her success, she has stayed true to her folk roots. In the last two years, she and Righteous Babe made two albums with the old labor activist and storyteller Utah Phillips, and she is also putting out a retrospective on Woody Guthrie.

DiFranco is constantly expanding her horizons. Last summer, she went on tour with Maceo Parker, James Brown's sax player, and Righteous Babe is currently producing a CD by the jazz poet Sekou Sundiata.

I spoke with her on March 8 in Madison, Wisconsin, while she was touring briefly with folk singers Greg Brown and Gillian Welch. The trio opened with a rendition of "Dump the Bosses off Your Back," which is on Fellow Workers (1999), the second album she did with Phillips. That CD, by the way, has liner notes by Howard Zinn.

Backstage at the Oscar Mayer Theater, we covered a lot of ground, including her views on patriotism, religion, the state of the music industry, and the confining expectations that her fans place on her. We also discussed her latest album, To the Teeth (1999).

This is the second time I've interviewed DiFranco, and I've seen her in concert three times. After each encounter with her, I walk away shaking my head at this marvel of energy and insight.

Q: You've got a lot of poetic lines in your music. For instance, in the song "Swing" on your latest album, there's a phrase, "weary as water in a faucet left dripping." Where does your interest in poetry come from?

Ani DiFranco: I've been into poetry since I was a little kid. When I was very young, I had sort of an idyllic early childhood. My parents were both very creative people, very interested in the arts, art hanging on the walls. But my family disintegrated by the time I hit puberty; my mom and I were living in a little apartment and concentrating on pain and strife, not art and creativity. But I got a lot of great messages as a young child and developed an interest in poetry real early on.

Q: How do you find space to write poetry or songs while you're touring all the time or in the studio, since writing is such a solitary act?

DiFranco: And I'm never alone these days, so the pattern that I've gotten into the last few years--touring is such a gauntlet, it's no longer meandering around in my car, you know, bumbling from couch to couch, having a couple of gigs a week like it used to be--I sort of just jot down little snatches of my thoughts, and that can go for months. I get to feeling very artistically constipated, you know, if I'm touring constantly. I have no room to develop my thoughts, or sort them out, or craft songs, or process what I'm thinking, so I just kind of spit out little bits. Then when I'm home for a few days, I just live inside my journal and try to make songs out of my ideas.

Q: You had folk singers come through your home as a kid. How did that happen?

DiFranco: Well, as a young dog, I befriended a Buffalo singer-songwriter named Michael Meldrum. I met him at the music store where my parents bought me my first guitar.

Q: How old were you at the time?

DiFranco: I was nine when I got my first little acoustic guitar, a child's guitar, a teenie little thing. And he was there at the store, and we just kind of became friends. I never actually took guitar lessons from him, but I was a precocious little kid, and we just hit it off, I'm not sure why, given that he was a thirty-some-year-old man. He started to bring me to his gigs, and I would play with him. He liked the novelty during his show of having a little girl up there with him, and for me it was very exciting: I was up playing in bars.

So Michael Meldrum started taking me around to his gigs. He was my buddy. I was his sidekick, and he started the Greenwich Village Song Project: He was bringing singer-songwriters in from New York City to play in little folk venues in Buffalo, and he needed a place to put up these folk singers, so they actually stayed in my room.

Q: So you brought them to the house, not your parents?

DiFranco: Yes, basically I did, yeah, and they were down for it. So I used to bunk with a bunch of folk singers.

Q: You've done two CDs with Utah Phillips. How did you hook up with him?

DiFranco: Well, we have the same booking agent. And both being folk singers, of course, we've shared many a stage at folk festivals and benefit concerts and this and that. We initially met--gosh, so many years ago--when we were both playing in Philly the same night and we were both billeted at the same surgeon's house, a patron of folk music.

Q: The folk underground railroad?

DiFranco: Yes, exactly, which, you know, used to be where I lived for years and years before I got my first hotel room. So, yeah, Utah and I actually met in the kitchen of these people's house. And it was funny. I was...