Ani DiFranco
A FORCE TO RECKON WITH Folkie Ani DiFranco Expands Her Horizons with an Ambitious Two-CD Set
Few artists inspire as much fanaticism from their admirers as Ani DiFranco. Since releasing her first album more than a decade ago, the Buffalo, New York, native has developed one of the largest cult followings in popular music, thanks to constant touring and spellbinding live performances. She's gone on to headline venues in the States that hold upward of 15,000 people -- not bad for someone who distributes her music through her own label, Righteous Babe Records. DiFranco is back in 2001 with the two-CD set Revelling: Reckoning, an ambitious, poetic, 29-track panorama that finds the guitar slinger exploring musical styles from folk to jazz. DiFranco recently spoke from her home to Barnes & Noble's Steve Baltin about her dance background, Joe Klein's biography, Woody Guthrie: A Life, and the difference between Revelling and Reckoning.
Barnes & Noble.com: Let's start with your new album. Did you find that writing for a band this time caused a shift in how you approached songwriting?
Ani DiFranco: I think I'm exploring different ways of writing. The Reckoning record is all very much the folksinger in me. The songs are pretty much written for and realized through an acoustic guitar. So I still love to do that. But then on the Revelling record, there are some songs that..."What, How, When, Where, Why, Who," for instance, is a song that started out with the groove. The initial idea was the groove and the bass line, and then the guitar part and the words. There are some pieces on that first disc where the focus is more musical as opposed to lyrical and the writing is more impressionistic, which is something I never used to do, because it was always the most condensed meaning and song sculpting coming from my folksinger roots. But there are so many different things you can focus on when you have this whole organism of the band, so I'm being able to mess with instrumental stuff, which I've never really done before.
B&N.com: The Revelling disc offers a variety of styles not normally associated with you.
AD: The Revelling record encompasses a lot of different contexts that I find my musical expression manifesting itself in these days. There's solo guitar and voice for the folksinger in me, and then there's sort of spoken-word material, instrumental kind of improvised pieces, and then the band arrangements. I think there's all kinds of things that I do with my music now that I wasn't doing earlier when I was more wedded to the verse-chorus-verse form and more conventional folk-melodic relationship.
B&N.com: Okay, let's go back to the beginning, if you don't mind. When did you first get interested in music? And who were your earliest influences when you started playing?
AD: Well, I started playing in the single digits. I was like nine when I got my first little acoustic guitar. My early influences were around me; they weren't recordings so much as people in Buffalo: my friend Michael Meldrum, who is a songwriter and guitar player. So my experience of music was always as something you do. All I can say about my lust for music...is that I've always relied so much on art to get me through. That's kind of trite and simple, but even when I was a kid, self-expression was pretty much my priority. It was the only thing that felt good a lot of times. I had a crazy childhood, and other people's self-expression was certainly what helped carry me through a lot of my life experiences too.... Of course, I'm a fan like everybody else on the planet. I don't know what I'd do without music -- and I'm not talking about mine, either.
B&N.com: When did you discover that it was something that you could do?
AD: I never asked that question, "Am I good enough?" Or I never had any expectations of it; it was just always something that I did do. I could certainly strum along when I was nine. Then, when I was 14, I started making my own songs 'cause I knew a lot of people in Buffalo who made songs. I just thought, "OK, well I could do that too." I never had any great vision for my future or anything. It's just pretty simple stuff, everybody can play guitar. Come on, you know they can.
B&N.com: I know you also paint. Do you draw your inspiration from other forms of art as well?
AD: In my younger days I used to dance, mostly. I thought I was gonna spend my life dancing. Then I went to art school.
B&N.com: What kind of dancing?
AD: Mostly modern dance. I danced with some regional Buffalo companies, and I love moving and expressing. Dance to me is so primal -- you have no tools whatsoever except for your body, which has an immediacy that I love. Although opening up the big hole in my face and making noises through it is also a very immediate thing, which suits me. [But I] went to art school. I have a great love of painting as well. So to me the lines between various art forms are very blurry.
B&N.com: How about books? Anything you've read recently?
AD: I was just talking to a friend who I handed my copy of Woody Guthrie: A Life by Joe Klein. It's such an incredible book. I was just having a conversation about it an hour ago and I think it's really an impressive piece of work. There's so much historical context and so much research that went into it and a painting of a very big picture of America in which Woody Guthrie is situated in that landscape. I found that it's a really powerful and informative piece of writing. I like to read stories. I love people who have a poetic approach to language, a creative approach to language.
B&N.com: What about songwriters?
AD: Gillian Welch is a new songwriter -- Gillian and David [Rawlings], who write together. And Greg Brown, of course; there's a reason why I called those two in particular to tour with me. They make some of my favorite acoustic music and songs.
B&N.com: Since you mention them, I had a chance to see the show you did at New York's Avery Fisher Hall with them. It was very important to you that your audience embraced them. Do you feel a desire to be a sort of ambassador of music?
AD: Yeah. It's a tremendous lust for music and other people's work. There's a stage, a microphone, and some lights streamed on me, and all of those things are opportunities the way I see them. Opportunities to communicate with people, to make people feel better about themselves, to put something positive into the world, maybe to even just point my finger somewhere else and have people look or listen to something that I've placed a lot of value in. I came out of the world of folk music, and I've had this crossover success, where people outside of the folk music community now know about my work, but not necessarily the work of somebody like Greg Brown, who's existed almost entirely within the folk music underground and has a long and incredible career there. So it is a joy to me to have that opportunity to help expose his work to a broader audience. But even people like Maceo Parker, who I think is a heroic musical figure -- inviting him on tour a couple of summers ago and exposing my audience to somebody like that is a really good feeling for me. And then there's also this selfish element; these are just people that I adore whose music inspires me. It's a really good job to travel around the planet and inspire other people, but I crave being inspired too. So calling up my favorite musicians is a way of helping me to get out of bed in the morning.
April 10, 2001
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