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The new singer-songwriter generation. The rise of acoustic rock. Artists go indie. Radical alternate tunings. Two-handed tapping. Pushing the acoustic-electric envelope. These were some of the forces that changed the face of acoustic music and the guitar in the ’90s, and they can all be neatly evoked with just two words: Ani DiFranco. With 14 solo albums, hundreds upon hundreds of gigs, and numerous genre-bending collaborations (with folk rabble-rouser Utah Phillips, saxman Maceo Parker, Prince . . .) during the last decade, DiFranco was an artistic force to be reckoned with. And now she’s roaring into the ’00s with her best album yet (To the Teeth), a new band spiced with New Orleans–inspired horns, and, as usual, enough projects and schemes to occupy six musicians with normal metabolisms. (To name a few: a Woody Guthrie collection, ’Til We Outnumber ’Em, featuring Bruce Springsteen, Indigo Girls, and others; an album by the duo Bitch and Animal; and the launch of Righteous Babe Books.) DiFranco’s current songwriting efforts are deeper, funkier, and more piercingly honest than ever, and her guitar work on acoustic, tenor, baritone, and electric shows the touch of a true master, although it has shifted toward the background with the expansion of her band. Curiously, though, DiFranco’s spectacular success in running her own label (2.5 million albums sold to date), coupled with her forthright, intelligent, and eminently quotable views about maintaining artistic integrity in the age of mega-corporations, have put her much more in the spotlight as the indie-label poster girl than as one of the defining artistic voices of our time. To shed some light on the techniques and inspirations behind her music, she met with me for an afternoon conversation backstage at the Luther Burbank Center in Santa Rosa, California, where her young fans had already been camped out for hours in anticipation of the evening’s show. In a room queasily decorated like the inside of a disco-era van, DiFranco succeeded in cracking open a window for a blast of fresh air, then sat down and offered these thoughts on the state of her music ten years after starting Righteous Babe Records and bursting out of the folk scene like a ball of fire. Revisiting your debut album recently, I was struck by a statement you made in the liner notes: "I speak without reservation from what I know and who I am. I do so with the understanding that all people should have the right to offer their voice to the chorus, whether the result is harmony or dissonance. The worldsong is a colorless dirge without the differences which distinguish us, and it is that difference which should be celebrated, not condemned. Should any part of my music offend you, please do not close your ears to it; just take what you can use and move on." Do you recall what was going through your mind when you wrote that? DiFranco Oh yeah, it went through my mind every day for years and years. I encountered so much resistance back in the early days. I started writing songs when I was 14 or something, but by the time I made that first record, I had been playing out, just beginning to get on the folk circuit and going to colleges around the Northeast. There wasn’t a lot of cultural precedent for women singing about their lives. My songs were informed by my life, my gender, my identity, and that seemed to have no place in the world around me. Like my anger, for instance: if I included that in my songs, in my vocabulary of emotions, I seemed to get a lot of defensive reactions. The audiences that I played to were much more polarized than they are now. The people who really embraced what I was saying and understood it were other young women, and then there was this whole contingent that [treated me as if] I were some kind of in-your-face, angry, screaming thrash band or something. I spent a lot of time on stage trying to convince people that no, I’m not an angry person, I just have opinions, and it’s not demeaning to you for me to talk about my experience. Did putting out a record feel like stepping into a much more public forum than performing? DiFranco No, it didn’t feel like that at all. For me the stage is an immediate, visceral, highly exposed, vulnerable place, and making a record is kind of vicarious. It never had the impact for me that performing does. But because the albums have lives of their own, I learned that recording things is much more exposing than being on stage for a fleeting moment. It’s this terrible, stagnant eternity of recorded music. Did some of the reactions you got come from addressing topics that people were just not ready to hear someone sing about? DiFranco Yeah. You know, I was singing about an abortion I had when I was 18, I was singing about sexual identity and the fluidity of that in my experience, and singing about power dynamics between men and women, and I would get these ridiculous responses. Middle-aged men would come up to me after a folk festival workshop and say, "Well, you know, men are not all bad," or something like that, and I’d be like, "Oh really? What a subtle interpretation of the song I just played." But it taught me a lot about the society around me, because I was writing these little songs and they were like cultural litmus tests. Anyone of any sex, age, make, or model could position themselves anywhere in the song. Did anyone in particular help light the fire in you to put your perspective out there? DiFranco I think I was just born with that fire. Inspiration has come from so many places, but that unquenchable need to express and communicate was an inherent thing. But back in the day, there were also a lot of people who were really supportive and welcoming, people like Tom Paxton or Utah Phillips or Greg Brown, or people who were just immediately like, "Yeah, welcome, shake it up." That sense of community I started to experience pretty early on was very inspiring and helped me to sustain myself, even just emotionally, out there alone, driving along folk club to folk club, just knowing that I’m not the only one who does that. Your guitar playing sounded very different on your debut than it does now. You did a lot more traditional fingerpicking and not so much with tunings and percussion. How did your style evolve? DiFranco There are so many factors. I learned how to play guitar with folk fingerpicking, but after years of playing solo in clubs and bars, I was learning to be my own rhythm section and starting to incorporate bass lines into my guitar parts. Fingerpicking is this direct relationship between rhythm and melody--that’s the incredible thing about the guitar, and my acoustic guitar taught me everything I know about music. It’s a percussion instrument, for sure, but every beat has a note to it, so that relationship became more and more intriguing to me, and the rhythm of the guitar part just became more and more primary in my consciousness. When I started playing with a band, I started trying to steer what was going on through the guitar. Over the years of playing with other musicians my playing just got tighter and tighter, and sparser and sparser, because I so much love the spaces in music. These days, you’re often riding on top of the other instruments, laying back more than you used to. DiFranco Now that I have a band that I love, we have a developing musical relationship that is so exciting, but I do play a lot less. On Out of Range or Not a Pretty Girl or before I started touring full-time with a band, I was getting my ya-ya’s out on the guitar a lot more, and I miss that. I just went on a little solo tour a couple weeks ago, and that was fun to get back to being my own band. Have alternate tunings been part of your playing for a long time? DiFranco Yeah, for a long time. The only tuning that I learned was D A D G A D, back in the day, and now I have a hundred little permutations of different tuning families. It’s all born of sitting around with my guitar looking for a new palette of colors. Are you aware of the notes when you retune? DiFranco Not all the time. . . . I’ve been throwing in a lot of C’s these days. I really like the sound of two C’s on top—B string up and E string way down, and maybe a C or a D on the bottom. I’ve also got a lot of tunings now with a pile of G’s in them. Some of your tunings go really low, like the song "Swing" from To the Teeth. DiFranco That’s actually on a baritone guitar, which I’ve been playing more these days. You’re also playing a lot of tenor guitar. Did you gravitate to these instruments by just searching for sounds? DiFranco The tenor guitar came to me from Scott [Freilich], who has a guitar shop in Buffalo [Top Shelf Music]. I’ve known him since I was 15—he was in my band when I was a teenager. He specializes in antique instruments and whatnot, and every now and then he’ll call me up and say, "I have this sweet beast in my shop you might want to check out." Many years ago he put this tenor guitar in my hands and I fell in love with it. And then I have such a fetish for a punchy, big, round, beefy acoustic guitar sound, I started thinking, maybe I’m playing the wrong instrument. Maybe I should be playing a baritone acoustic. So I checked out a bunch of baritone guitars, and now I have one of those Danelectro reissue electric baritones, which is a really beautiful thing. You’re playing acoustic baritone, too. DiFranco Yeah, most of the time. It’s an Alvarez, and it’s really sweet. Are you still playing the Alvarez Bob Weir model you’ve been using for years? DiFranco Yeah. I have a relationship with them now, and they help me out, because I tend to beat my guitars to hell. I mean I love them, I don’t intentionally hurt them at all, but I claw through the faces and break braces. My guitar tech, Reg, has become like this mad scientist, and he’s constantly messing with the intonation, tweaking the preamp, replacing the pickup, trying different gauge strings. . . . We’re in a constant dialogue. So you get into that tech stuff, too? DiFranco Oh yeah! You know, my whole life is the way that guitar sounds coming back through the monitors. Some musicians have no head for that kind of thing—they just want to plug and play. DiFranco I’m so jealous of those people! Greg Brown, for instance, brilliant songwriter, stands up on stage, plugs it in, "OK, seems good," not feeding back. Being at liberty to just play, and not to be microscopically aware of the tone of your instrument all the time, it must be so fabulous. But me, I subject myself and some other very unfortunate people to excruciating sound checks. But I’m also trying to get my instrument to do something it’s not really designed to do. And I hate that scratchy, tinny acoustic guitar business. Do you still like to overdrive the acoustic for distortion and other effects? DiFranco Oh yeah. All my guitars run through a wah pedal that has a little switch that’s off unless I go for it. And they all run through a little amp so I can add crunch now and then. On record, a lot of the time, I’ll mic the guitar in a couple places and take the pickup direct--oftentimes punchiness in the bass is what I’ll use that [pickup] channel for. And then I send it to an amp, so I can get kind of a shifting guitar sound from just playing one track. You’ve obviously done a lot of experimenting in the studio. DiFranco Well, you sit behind a board for enough years and you start turning knobs--either that or you fall asleep. I’ve always made my own records, so it’s been a really deep learning slope for me, but it’s all about figuring out how to use my ears and how to use gear to satisfy my ears. Had you done much recording before your first album? DiFranco Yeah, little cassettes before then or whatnot. But the first album was recorded in just a couple of hours with two microphones, direct to DAT. Then there was a bunch of years of recording in cheesy Buffalo or Toronto studios with long-haired metal guys, people who didn’t necessarily have ears for acoustic music. And I’m just there all alone, without any conception of what an acoustic guitar should sound like or what I’m going for, just complete ignorance. So there were many albums that reflect mostly on the engineers’ sensibilities that I was working with. It took me a good ten records before I started to have an aesthetic at all. On which album did that kick in? Little Plastic Castle? DiFranco Before that. It’s a very gradual process. I started to move in the direction of my own sound with Out of Range, Not a Pretty Girl--I can hear the beginnings of an idea. With Dilate, I was completely alone in the studio for most of that mixing process, and I was also just in a really bad mood. I was working in this studio without any kind of subwoofer, and I’d had the worst year of my life, and I was making this punishing album of ‘I just want to put my head in a hole’ songs and not even hearing what I’m doing on the low end. So it’s this colossal record of buffing bass. You’ve been recording at an incredible rate over the last ten years. These days, how long do you typically spend making a record? DiFranco A couple weeks. I can’t spend a lot of time in the studio. A few weeks ago I was on tour with Gillian Welch and Greg Brown, and I was talking to Gillian and David [Rawlings], the dynamic duo, about their two records, and I was flabbergasted at the amount of money and time that they spent in the studio. For their first record, they spent six weeks in the studio. And it’s almost all just two guitars and two voices-- DiFranco --and all you have to do is sit them down and press record and there’s the song. It’s not like there’s any kind of tomfoolery going on on those records. And I was like, what do you do for six weeks? That whole culture of perfection, I have no patience for that. Making music is so immediate, and the fact that there’s no audience in the studio is a hurdle for me to begin with. I just can’t sit around and try and make the perfect vocal and the perfect guitar track. I lose artistic inspiration for that kind of obsessiveness. So what I’ve learned to do these days, starting with the Up Up Up record, is to record a bunch of different times, because the song as you play it on any given day is just that day’s interpretation. I thought, "OK, if I can’t sit for a week and think about a song in the studio and play it a hundred times, then maybe I could record a bunch of songs this week, record all those same songs four months later, somewhere else, and then do it again three months later." We recorded To the Teeth over the course of three- to seven-day snatches, and a lot of stuff I recorded myself in the timelessness of the wee hours over the course of a year. Then you have a few different versions that happen in the moment, but you can put them against each other and say, "OK, this one sounds most like the song, and that one, I don’t know what we were on that day." When I look at the amount of recording you do, the amount of touring you do, plus the label and all the other projects, it seems impossible that you would have the kind of concentrated time you need for writing songs. How do you do that? DiFranco Just eliminating sleep, basically . . . I see the sunrise most mornings. People have always asked me that, and I never really knew the answer, except I’m beginning to realize that it’s that time I spend lying awake all night. Like last night, this morning, I saw the sunrise and then I got into my little bunk, my little coffin on the bus, and I couldn’t sleep and I sort of catnapped until about 11:30. Then I got up because all I could think of was, I have two new people in my band, horn section, and I have all of these specific suggestions about what people are playing, and then kind of theoretical things I want to try to express to bring us closer, to keep us listening more and more. So I was lying awake having conversations in my head with my band members, and then I was thinking about albums I’m gonna record soon. There’s just so much subconscious work that I have to do when I’m not literally working. So you can get into that creative mode, wherever you may be. DiFranco Because of the chaos and the velocity of my life nowadays, I’ve had to learn how to write and whatnot on the road. I was just down in the dressing room working on a little riff and an idea for a new song. I used to be much more precious about it; I used to have to be alone, completely alone, in my own space and sometimes for days before I could really start to talk to myself. But now as my life has gotten ridiculous, I’ve consciously taught myself to sit in a corner, facing a wall, and work on a lick while everybody’s horsing around in the dressing room or shaving heads. I’ll chat with them but try to find my own headspace too. But it’s really claustrophobic sometimes. I covet my time alone; that’s very rare. I would like to do more decompressing and more writing, but I also get such gratification and such inspiration from [all the activity]. It’s this catch-22 of creating and doing. Do you write a lot more music than you actually perform or record? DiFranco Yeah. We have a studio in our little house. I got hitched to my engineer--he does the stage sound, monitors, on tour--and when we go home what he loves to do is watch little levels on preamps and plug in microphones, and what I love to do is make sounds, so we’re this symbiotic little force. Whenever we go home now we’re recording. I’ll just pick something up and he’ll stick a mic in front of it. Most of the time he doesn’t know, are we making a record or are we having fun? I’ll clue him in at some point as to what I think I’m doing. How much space does the label take up in your head while you’re doing all these other things? DiFranco I have to be conscious of it, but I’m at a very good place these days where something crazy like 15 people work at the label, very instrumental people like Scot Fisher, my manager, who’s the president of the record company and runs the joint and has for years. He is much more the day-to-day creator of Righteous Babe Records than I am. I’m the idea and the energy behind it, and he’s the one who really makes it happen. Without him, I’d still be selling tapes out of the trunk of my car. So I have the luxury of coming up with ideas like making a record with Utah Phillips and then be able to realize that idea with the help of all the people at the label. It has also given me this mechanism to do political work using the resources of the company. Do you still get down into every detail of the CD artwork and such? DiFranco Oh yeah. Actually, for our new record of Woody Guthrie songs, the artwork was designed by a real graphic designer. I think a lot of people have this impression that I’m a colossal control freak, that I have to do everything myself. But [in reality], once you make the decision that you’re not going to work for a corporation and you still want to make music, there’s nobody else around to do all of that stuff, and for years I’ve coveted the help of, for instance, a graphic designer. It’s only recently that I’ve had the money to pay people or the phone number to call when I need help of a certain sort. In the past, you’ve expressed frustration with being known as the Righteous Babe CEO. Do you still feel that people have an undue awareness of you as running a business as opposed to just playing music? DiFranco Yeah. That’s a somewhat unique story, so I can see where the media would pick that up and run with it, and run with it, and run with it, and run with it. But after awhile, the irony of having people never actually talk about what I do, like write songs or play guitar or sing or whatever it is. . . . The people who come out to the shows know why they’re there, and it’s not really because of my brilliant business strategy. Writers tend to hyphenate your music with the word punk--usually as punk-folk. But your warmth and generosity on stage is just completely out of sync with the punk attitude. DiFranco Yeah, well, all of that media definition and description . . . that’s why I don’t read anything about me. Since the Little Plastic Castle record came out, I went cold turkey--I read nothing about myself, and I’m such a happier person. Because whenever you’re described or defined by somebody else, you can always see what are the little pieces of you in there and what are the pieces of the person doing the talking, which can be so big sometimes. It’s striking how you cross generational boundaries. The audiences at your shows tend to be very young, but then you have connections with people like Greg Brown, who is baby-boomer age, and Utah Phillips . . . DiFranco Long live folk music, man. When I was first poking my little badger head out of the folk music underground, I used to play to a lot of middle-aged acoustic/roots music fans. And then as word got out, there was that other contingent of young, college-aged, and then even younger listeners. It’s been one of my gleeful roles to bring young people to folk festivals, and at a lot of the folk festivals that I’ve played in recent years there’s been a really warm feeling because the people who run the thing are excited to have teenagers showing up. Of course, one of my blatantly strategic missions is to bring young audiences to people like Utah Phillips, and to Greg Brown and Gillian Welch, who I just orchestrated a tour with. That was a dream bill, but the contrasts in style are huge. What was the common ground? DiFranco Songs. It’s all about the songs. Greg and I have a long-standing friendship and musical relationship, admiration from a distance kind of thing. With Gil and David, I just finally convinced them that this was a good idea, but I think they had an impression of, "Ooh, she’s a rock star--I don’t know what this scene is going to be like." But after the first couple of shows of starting to really hear each other’s songs and play on each other’s songs, we became this great musical family. It was really beautiful, and there was this atmosphere of total inspiration. I kicked it off every night; I was kind of hostess, and I would say, "OK, the theme for the first round is . . . the song that’s not finished that you’re working on now." I started playing something that I was working on, and people just rose to the occasion totally. To the Teeth featured a lot of horn charts and what I would call a sonic collision of New Orleans with the Salvation Army. Is that direction continuing? DiFranco I’ve always been a huge fan of brass. Actually, before I met the woman who plays keyboards with me, Julie [Wolf], I was looking for a trumpet player. I’ve been wanting to incorporate brass for a long time, and last summer I orchestrated this tour with Maceo Parker, where we got so tight and had so much fun playing with each other. There was no going back--I was like, "Oh, I must get my own horn section." I’ve been hanging a lot in New Orleans the last couple years and made a bunch of friends down there. The summer before last, I invited the Rebirth Brass Band on tour. Irvin Mayfield, the trumpeter who played on the record [on the song "Going Once"], is an incredible cat on the scene down there now. The brass arrangements on the record are perfectly in sync with your latest songs—which, to me, are your best yet. DiFranco I put so much of myself into To the Teeth, and I have so much love for that record, much more than I have ever felt for a record that I’ve made. I really felt satisfied with the work that I did there, and the relationship with my band and the people that I work with is so positive and so cool. . . . I feel like I’m just starting to hit my stride. Excerpted from Acoustic Guitar magazine, September 2000, No. 93. That issue also contains a transcription of DiFranco's song "Hello Birmingham." Read about the Ani DiFranco's guitars and gear in the What They Play department. |
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