Ani DiFranco.

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 new on the folk circuit at the time, and I felt a lot of tension from these folk patrons about having me in their home--shaved-headed little punk girl--and I think they were very uncomfortable with me, which I used to get a lot from the old folk fascists. I felt like they were combing through their house hiding their candlesticks. And I walked into the kitchen and there was Utah, and his presence just cleared the air completely. Because he was like, "Hey, I've heard about you," and, "We're stable mates now," and, "It's just great to finally meet you." And we sort of immediately recognized in each other that we were doing the same work. People look at us, and on my side they would see a little punk girl and on his side they would see Santa Claus or an old Wobbly storyteller. And our uniforms look very different, and our ages and our audiences, and yet we're telling a lot of the same stories in our own ways.

Q: Why did you decide to collaborate?

DiFranco: So much of the power of Utah's work is in his storytelling. And of course when us folk singers make records, we record songs. But our performances so often incorporate so much more, as opposed to pop music or rock `n' roll. A performance is often a journey from beginning to end; you take people through ideas. And another thing Utah and I always use is humor to open people up, to make them relax, to facilitate talking about some heavy ideas without dragging it down.

Q: In a way, you're trying to take your audience through his ideas: that tradition of old labor radicalism.

DiFranco: Yes, certainly. Through this record [The Past Didn't Go Anywhere, 1996], I wanted to document his storytelling. So I just asked him if he had any live recordings, and he sent me a box of cassettes that represented his career outside of his albums. I started making music behind them in that first record.

Q: But this one, Fellow Workers, is even more of a collaboration. In that first one, you were the producer and supplied the background music. On this one, you're also the co-performer.

DiFranco: Yes, yes. It was kind of an exciting development in Utah's career to have young people suddenly coming out to his shows, for me to get his work and his vision--which was kind of my calculated purpose--to some of my audience. After we made that first one, he suggested that we try doing it again but this time as an actual collaboration. So Fellow Workers came out of that. It was a very strenuous process to make that record.

Q: That surprises me because it doesn't sound that way.

DiFranco: Oh, that's good.

Q: It sounds really spontaneous and light, even though there's heavy politics in there. It sounds like you're just in a living room with friends who are laughing at his stories.

DiFranco: Well, there was certainly a good deal of spontaneity. We had three days of rehearsal. I had been corresponding with Utah, asking him to maybe filter some ideas to me about what he wanted to talk about on this record. Nothing. So the morning of day one was, sit down, start talking, buddy. So I had to order and structure things into songs: OK, let's have one idea be Mother Jones, your story about "The Most Dangerous Woman." One of the things that made the process so strenuous was that Utah had never done a collaboration like that at all. Even to try to give cues--all of that was so foreign to him.

Q: One of the songs you're more actively involved in on this album is "Why Come." This is where I think you're trying to grab your audience by the shirt. [Phillips asks: "Why come young people, with all they have, can't organize to change the conditions of our lives?" And DiFranco echoes, "Why come? Why come?"]

DiFranco: That whole kind of humorous escalation at the end of that song, that was just something I started basically improvising. The way we had rehearsed the ending was a little different, and Utah just kind of ended, and so it was like, OK, and there was that pregnant pause.

Q: Let's talk about your latest album, To the Teeth. Why don't you start with the title song. I assume a school shooting inspired these lyrics:

   open fire on hollywood
   open fire on MTV
   open fire on NBC
   and CBS and ABC
   open fire on the NRA
   and all the lies they told us
   along the way
   open fire on each weapons manufacturer
   while he's giving head
   to some republican senator

DiFranco: Yeah, I wrote it after Columbine. Sometimes I feel fortunate to have retained enough of my innocence in this world to still be living in disbelief at the way society operates. You know, I just can't believe the kind of discourse that happens and does not happen around the gun issue. It seems like a mass insanity to me, like, how we can let business control our society to the extent that our common sense doesn't seem even a factor anymore? You know, just the NRA running the government, and the interests of weapons manufacturers being much more paramount than the interests of people in this country.

It seems obvious to me, if you just look north of the forty-ninth, you can see a country much like our own where the handgun deaths are a tiny fraction of what they are in this country. I just feel we're in a state of crisis at this point, it's so much seeped into our culture. We have a culture of guns and gun romanticism.

In this song, I felt such an urgent need to at least put into the air around myself the way I perceive the issue of a society chock full of guns. Like, how can we allow the media and our entertainment conglomerates to promote guns so much and to foster this romanticism of guns amongst the youth, and how can we allow the NRA to control the government, and how can we allow weapons manufacturers to get more money than our fucking schools?

So I just decided to put it right up front on the record, like, you know, I didn't even want to beat around the bush. And some folks were saying, "Wow, that's kind of an intense way to start a record," and I just think, like, you know, if you're in a listening station at a record store and you're wondering what this is about, this is what this is about, OK, so just fucking deal with it.

Q: In "To the Teeth," you're not saying go shoot people, are you?

DiFranco: No, it's metaphoric. It's kind of like, rather than just buy into this gun mania and open fire on each other because we're bombarded with that imagery, why don't we open fire ideologically on these sources of violence, which I consider big business.

It's so maddening to me when people who start criticizing this culture of violence point to rappers and say, this guy is promoting violence, and look at him toting around his guns. Meanwhile, there is an army of white businessmen behind him who are selling this. That one rapper wouldn't begin to have the power to promote violence throughout the society; it takes a whole lot of businesspeople to do that. It's interesting how when people do start pointing fingers, it only goes so far. It rarely seems to hit the actual power structure behind it all.

Q: Another song on To the Teeth also deals with violence. It's called "Hello, Birmingham." It's about Dr. Barnett Slepian, the obstetrician and abortion doctor who was gunned down in Buffalo in 1998, right? Tell me how you decided to do this one.

DiFranco: I'm from Buffalo, New York, and I live there now. I was not in the city when the shooting occurred, but I was there soon after. And the whole idea that, you know, a doctor who performs abortions is not safe in his own home, it just makes the atmosphere so claustrophobic. So I remember returning back to Buffalo and there was this feeling of dull fear just hanging over the city.

That's another terrifying circumstance in our country right now: the rightwing Christian terrorism that is occurring and not being addressed and dealt with as it should be. And Buffalo, New York, has long been a shit-magnet for these kinds of extremists. We had, I can't remember how many years ago, the first "Spring of Life," where all of these anti-abortion people besieged the city. They would camp outside women's clinics and just raise hell. They would make what is often one of the most difficult days in a young woman's life that much more difficult.

Q: You talk in the song about you yourself going to an abortion clinic.

DiFranco: Yes, I was eighteen, in Buffalo, and at that time there were only a few people screaming very angry things at me as I was walking into the clinic. And it was before a lot of these bombings and shootings started to occur with more frequency, so I wasn't fearing for my life at the time. But I think now I would.

The responsibility of birthing future generations rests on the shoulders of young women, and there are so many burdens that go along with that, and there's so much that a young woman faces and has to deal with that we're often on our own. And then to compound that with a fear for your life, with mortal fear, I think is just so terribly wrong. We can't see our way to actually trying to help young women in this journey, in this responsibility. Instead, we make it almost impossible.

Q: You have a line in that song about "blood pouring off the pulpit." You're talking about the hypocrisy of the religious right, aren't you?

DiFranco: It's such a basic, huge, looming hypocrisy. People who are so concerned about the unborn, quote unquote, and the life of a zygote, and yet they're willing to kill human beings, and completely, often, disregard the lives of actual children. There are many children existing on the planet already who could use that kind of love and dedication--as opposed to a bit of blood and tissue, which I think is a misfocusing of that kind of concern. And again, a lot of the people, of course, who are so staunchly against abortion rights are just fine with the military or the death penalty. The hypocrisy can be very high with some of those folks.

Q: On Up, Up, Up, Up, Up, Up (1998), you have another religious reference. You say, "God's work isn't done by God. It's done by people." What are you driving at there?

DiFranco: Well, I'm not a religious person myself. I'm an atheist. I think religion serves a lot of different purposes in people's lives, and I can recognize the value of that, you know, the value of ceremony, the value of community, or even just having a forum to get together and talk about ideas, about morals--that's a cool concept. But then, of course, institutional religions are so problematic.

And that line from the song, anyway, is how unfortunate it is to assign responsibility to the higher up for justice amongst people. My spirituality tends to be more in the vein of, if there is a God it exists within us, and the responsibility for justice is on our shoulders. What if we just looked to each other in this way? What if the steeples didn't all point up? What if they all pointed at us, and we had to care for each other in the way that we expect God to care for us? I'm much more interested in that.

Q: What about your feelings about patriotism? On Not a Pretty Girl (1995), you say, "I am a patriot." And in" 'Tis of Thee," the first song on Up, Up, Up, Up, Up, Up, you sing about patriotism with a twist.

DiFranco: It's very much a love song for this country, my country. Mark Twain had a wonderful quote, "Loyalty to the country always; loyalty to the government when it deserves it." That's an essential distinction that I find very compelling. Because what is America? You can look at it and say it's the government. You can look at it from all different angles. One way of looking at it is this incredible land and all its splendor. And the people, and all of the cultures, and all of the creativity and the beauty that comes out of that. I have endless love and pride for all of that. And then there's the evil monolith of America that I fucking have to travel around the world and make excuses for.

This song" 'Tis of Thee," I often wonder what people hear when I'm singing the chorus because different people, different characters appear. [The chorus goes, in part: "We'll never live long enough to undo everything they've done to you."]

Q: You're singing about a poor black man. That's the "you" of the chorus, the way I took it.

DiFranco: I was wondering if people would hear it that way. In a sense, you could interpret it that way. But the "you" in the chorus is the country. I'm saying, look at what they've done to you as in us, as in it, as in the promise of America. Too bad it's a system built on the fundamentals of racism and classism, et cetera, et cetera.

Q: You've consistently gone your own way. That's your trademark. You started up Righteous Babe, and kept the music execs at bay. Are they still knocking, or have they gotten the message?

DiFranco: I think they've gotten the message, yeah: Indie girl won't sign.

Q: Is that option open to other artists?

DiFranco: Absolutely. That's the thing about folk music; many of them do do that. This whole idea of making albums on your own and selling them at your shows and then maybe using independent distribution if you can get to that level, which is a tough one to achieve, but such a good and necessary thing for remaining independent. There are many, many people who do that. It's certainly not an idea that I came up with at all in any way, and it is a very common thing in the folk world.

But maybe the difference is a lot of people perceive it as a means to an end: You're independent because you can't get a major label deal or you're on the way to the big deal, whereas for me it's an end in itself, and there is a lot of political thought that goes behind that decision for me.

Q: What is some of that?

DiFranco: Well, I mean, basically, I have a real problem with the priorities of business. And especially the bigger the business gets, the more those priorities are contrary to the interests of communities, to the interests of people, to the interests of art. In this whole music industry of marrying business and art, almost always the art suffers.

Q: How has the consolidation in the communications industry--five companies owning something like 80 percent of the music--affected the art of music?

DiFranco: On all levels of the industry, you have power consolidation. You have corporate takeovers of not just record companies where all the intermediary companies are being bought up and all of the little artists are being dropped--you also have these mergings of production companies. In terms of touring, there are these huge promotion companies that also own venues now and also now are affiliated with record companies and also now are merging with radio station conglomerates. And not only that, they are connected with billboard companies. So you have complete vertical integration of, and corporate control over, the music industry. It's all becoming very controlled: not only whose records do people know about, but what's on the radio, and what shows do people go to.

It's really quite terrifying on the one side, and really quite hopeful on the other because the possibilities that I am sort of trying to investigate for being independent and for counteracting that system are more and more there. People pushing the possibilities of being independent, and making music, and making a living, having a job. I'm sort of known for that only because I've taken it somewhat further than a lot of people have taken it. You know, just technology being more accessible for producing CDs. I remember when I first started making records, making a CD was a bit of a stretch. It was too expensive, too mysterious, but now anyone can make a CD. You can make them in your homes.

So the possibilities of being independent are growing and growing. And, of course, people talk about the Internet a lot, though I really haven't exercised that option very fully.

Q: What's next for you?

DiFranco: There's an album of Woody Guthrie songs that we're releasing. There was a live recording of a performance done years ago, and it's myself, Billy Bragg, Bruce Springsteen, Arlo Guthrie, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, the Indigo Girls, Dave Pirner. The concert happened as a benefit for the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York, run by Nora Guthrie [Woody's daughter]. And there was also a conference--lots of panels and workshops about Woody. So Nora agreed that Righteous Babe would put out a recording of the show, and then, as I'm wont to do, I took voices from the conference. People talking about Woody. Arlo's voice talking about his father. So the album is sort of an introduction to Woody Guthrie for younger people.

Q: Do you consider yourself a descendant of Woody Guthrie?

DiFranco: Absolutely. You know, I just come from that whole community that grew out of Woody and Pete [Seeger] and the People's Songs Movement.

Q: Tell me about your stage performances. You're much more than a recording artist, a studio artist. A lot of what you do is the dynamo of the stage performance. When I sit here talking to you, you seem like a different person than the person who metamorphoses on the stage. How do you do that?

DiFranco: I don't know how I came upon that. I'm twenty-nine, going on thirty, so you know, it's been about twenty years now of performing. I certainly wasn't always that way. And I think I just have so much passion for what I do and I love it so much and I get off so much on connecting with an audience and communicating ideas. For me, I'm not happy with a performance unless I can make that connection. And I think over the years not only have I taught myself what that takes and how to go there every night but my audience has also. I think they're extraordinary, too. They are capable of such a fervency, and such an excitement, and such a high energy. And I feel like they're really there for me when I have to express something, and they know how much respect and love I have for them. So it really allows for some very rewarding moments on stage, and I live for them. I completely live for them.

Q: Does it ever get asphyxiating?

DiFranco: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Don't get me complaining because I could go all day!

One basic ridiculous assumption that I've encountered is that success equals compromise. When I first started being recognized in mainstream media, there were a lot of people crying "Sellout!" just by the automatic assumption that I must be doing something different now, that I must have sold my soul in order to be appearing in that magazine. The assumption being that political dedication equals obscurity.

Q: The logic of that gets you in a desert pretty fast.

DiFranco: Yeah, is there no creative possibility for taking political dedication and love of music and art and also paying your rent and also reaching more people? That's my whole thing: I'm not willing to compromise any of that for success. So success, if it happens, happens twenty years later. And it's a long, slow process. It's really interesting for me to see how people from the outside perceive and project. There's that typical momentum towards familiarity that all people have. And if there's anything I do it's change and grow. I'm just a living being. Every year of my life I seem to learn that everything I know is wrong.

Q: Reminds me of my favorite Dylan line: "He not busy being born is busy dying."

DiFranco: Yeah, totally. So, you know what, I may not be the person you expect me to be, that I was two years ago, or five years ago, and I may not fit whatever image of me you have in your mind.

Q: Is that why you say on Little Plastic Castle (1998), "Someone call the girl police"?

DiFranco: Yeah, you know, I learn so much about societal, cultural dynamics through my constant growth. My whole early prehistory, you know, shaved-headed little girl in overalls and big old boots. There were very practical reasons why I looked like that. In my own life, I wanted to move away from the life I led as a teenager, playing in bars where I had long hair and looked very feminine and the attention I got was very male and very sexually oriented. There was just that vibe. You know, young chick.

I found that not conducive to my work, or to what I was trying to do. So, cut my hair off. Changed my shoes. And bang, boy, did that change the environment of my performances.

And then after many years of doing that, it's like, OK, I want hair to play with. Or, oooh, that's a pretty dress. And I remember the first time that I started walking out on stage in a dress and hearing young women screaming "Sellout!" They were just coming to know their own anger, and it hadn't deepened with an awareness that feminism is truly about women becoming themselves, and having choices, and I remember those angry, angry responses, and thinking, "Wow!"

Q: That didn't get to you?

DiFranco: It totally did. And there were so many things like that along the way, every little change.

Q: You never thought, screw this? Take this badge off of me?

DiFranco: Oh, no. If anything, it makes me feel like I've got to fucking walk out there in gold lame and pumps.

Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive magazine. Righteous Babe Records can be reached at P.O. Box 95, Ellicott Station, Buffalo, NY 14205, or by calling [phone].