Ani DiFranco New LP

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Ani DiFranco’s Memoirs

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Review

I first came across DiFranco in the late 90s through her highly acclaimed album, LITTLE PLASTIC CASTLE (still one of my favourite DiFranco albums). That music led me to acquiring every previous LP and all future releases. In addition, I witnessed and photographed several live performances and read every one of her poems, including her extraordinary SELF EVIDENT (link below). As a result of her unique talent and my respect for this singer/songwriter she has featured many times on Shakenstir, with albums regularly appearing in our albums-of-the-year lists since 1999. It is to my regret that I never interviewed DiFranco but then much of what she is and was is featured in her songs. Despite the songs, articles and other interviews there’s much about this extraordinary artist that remained a mystery to me, until now; knowledge gaps which this book largely fills.

And the road to knowledge has seldom been more enjoyable, and surprising…DiFranco is an accomplished writer and like her music her writing style is distinctive and poetic. The story starts at a tender young age and with a set of parents who encouraged and set examples. DiFranco describes great respect for her mother and great love for her Italian father. Each parent contributed something different to DiFranco - her mother provided knowledge while her father gifted a love of music and freedom of thought, unhindered by convention, rules and regulations. They were the solid foundation for the future DiFranco built for herself.

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DiFranco’s early life was dominated by her love for dance until she discovered the power of music and her talent for it. Like many great artists, her parent’s (especially her father’s) quality music collections sewed the seed which bloomed with her own discoveries which included jazz, folk, pop and African groove. Listening to her records and watching her perform live reveal that she has a unique guitar-playing style and sound. She explained:

With my penchant for cranking the low end on my acoustic guitar and playing bass lines in and amongst my chording, we sounded like a band. Over the course of the next few years, the question asked most frequently of the dudes running sound at our gigs was, “So…is there a bass player?” (as in; I hear one but I don’t see one) or, “Are you playing bass tracks?”

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From early on in her playing career DiFranco and her playing partner developed an explosive and dynamic style:

When we rocked, we rocked with a balls-to-the-wall force. There was no steadiness or polish to what we were doing but there was an intensity and my old whisper-to-a-scream dynamic to hold audiences captive. Words tumbled, in avalanche after avalanche, from my mouth as my tongue and Andy’s four limbs attempted to keep up with my right hand. I was already experiencing pushback from the world to the feminist challenge of my lyrics and my response seemed to be to push harder. I banged at the gates. I grabbed and rattled them. My singing voice abandoned its former attempts at prettiness and became more visceral and even cat-like at its jagged peak. Meanwhile, Andy and I were learning how to play, we were learning how to tour, we were learning how to grab an audience by the crotch and hold them there, making them laugh and cry until they forgot about being scared.

DiFranco had chances to sign the dreaded recording contract with major players but…:

It looked like this was really my chance to jump into the big time and I felt the gravitational pull of ambition. But then…I saw myself inside that sparkly, showy world that I disdained and I tried to picture myself playing along, I just couldn’t. I don’t want to care about my image. I don’t want to kiss the camera and work it. ‘You don’t need anybody’, I told myself once again and I took a deep breath and walked away from that building [I.R.S. Records, distributed by EMI] in Hollywood. I went back to my scrappy little life.

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Ultimately she was to start her own label, Righteous Babe Records, after initially selling cassettes out of her car boot at gigs. Reading the adventures (and misadventures) of her earlier nomadic life my own felt highly sheltered and fearful. But much of it contributed valuable song material in addition to two abortions, bisexual experiences and dodgy, questionable lodgings (including a bus shelter and her car). Eventually marriage, divorce and two children and all the while trying to perfect her music recording processes to create the fabulous sound of many of her records:

Making records is a uniquely different art form from song-making or performing. In retrospect, I might have done well to humble myself and seek more help but I was DIY to the core so I didn’t. In the end, it would take me a lot longer to learn how to make records than to learn how to make songs or shows, for the obvious reason that those other things were things I practiced every day. Recordings, even at the pace of a couple a year in the early days, have taken me the better part of twenty years to get right…I have struggled my entire life with the task of recording a dynamic singing voice and a dynamic acoustic guitar happening right next to each other. Because my voice always goes into the guitar mic and vice versa, I was often advised to record the two things separately in the early days. Guitar first. It seems unfortunate, in retrospect, to have forgone capturing the organic interplay of the two for the purposes of having discrete sounds. Maybe one mic for both is better?…There’s simply no substitute for having good microphones, choosing them carefully, and then taking your time massaging their placement until you achieve a decent, not-too-phase-y sound on both things at once.

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All too often at live gigs I’ve found sound management (and lighting) to be sub-standard and gig-ruining. DiFranco suffered from this dilemma:

The straw that broke the camel’s back was, once again, the psychologically exhausting interface with the sound guy du jour. After all the travelling and making myself available to so many people, to find myself in a needless power struggle every time I walked into a place just broke me down. They just couldn’t accept my ideas about the caoustic guitar. It made them mad…And though my gigs were starting to be in places with actual sound systems, the duded in charge of running them were not necesssarily top of their firld. The daily blasts of brain-splitting feedback alone were enough to make a girl question her very existence…”If you want your own sound guy, you’re going to have to sell T-shirts. That’s all there is to it,” he said, chewing his food…Scot had been talking to people and doing his research and he was convinced that this was the only way that I could afford to pay another person on the road.

And of course there is DiFranco’s views on politics, social and economic justice:

Yes, we would like to imagine that socio-political evolution is a checklist-that we can check things off and then sit back down-but social justice is an uphill climb. If we drop the ball, even for a moment, it rolls backwards. The forces of greed are there to pull us right back down. Who among us will dare to dream? Dream not just for a modicum of safety and a living wage but…the really big dreams. For me: The Reproductive Freedom Amendment. The abolition of the Electoral College. The revamp of the electoral system, the criminal justice system, the health care and education systems. The dawning of sustainability through conservation and biomimicry. Prioritizing and incentivizing the greening of industry through regulation. Regulation of the financial sector. Closing the loopholes and bringing the tax structure back into the realm of reason.

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Towards the end of this frank and fascinating book DiFranco sums up her experiences:

I divorced Goat. I fired my band. I turned deep inside and I remained there for years. I wondered over rocky terrain, around huge boulders of embarrassment, shame and regret. I turned over every rock that I was strong enough to lift and looked underneath, gaining some strength as I went. I sat there alone by my campfire and tossed things in, one and then the next. I was not yet ready to live in my personal relationships with the integrity that I lived in the world but I knew I was through with the alternative. I was focused now on learning.

I went from being married and promiscuous to alone and celibate. Not that I was working this awakening thing like a monk or anything. I was meandering through it more like a drunk than a monk. For a while there, I was putting away a bottle of wine a night by myself and I’m only five foot two so that was mor than enough to hit pause on the pain. In an outward statement of how hard it is to let go of things, I left the empty wine bottles pile up around me in the kitchen. They were everywhere. My fridge was empty.

I have never read a more interesting, honest and open account of one’s life and career. For me, it’s no less than a masterpiece of modern writing and poetry. It is sometimes funny, often moving and essential reading for DiFranco fans and anybody interested in the reality of living in the last decades of musical history, the struggle for artistic independence, and the development of a highly individual and distinctive style.

5/5

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