Ani DiFranco reflects on her life and career ahead of Saturday’s Liberty Hall show
Ani Difranco. // Photo Credit Anthony Mulcahy
This Saturday, singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco comes to Liberty Hall in Lawrence to celebrate the 25th anniversary of her first live album, Living In Clip. The musician is also preparing to release her first children’s book this coming March, entitled The Knowing, after decades of prose, poetry, and music.
We reached out to the iconic musician via email to discuss all of this and more.
The Pitch: While you’ve been releasing music since 1990, the past few years have seen you becoming a writer of another sort, with your autobiography in 2019 and now a children’s book next March. How does writing books and prose challenge you in a way writing music doesn’t?
Ani DiFranco: So many ways! Writing prose felt like sculpting–like tap tap tapping away all day at some amorphic rock, slowly bringing something into shape. Running a vision of it in the background of all your waking hours… for years… mulling it over. Basically, it took a lot of stick-to-itiveness, which was a different pace from songs!
The children’s book is different again. Not so epic an undertaking as a memoir, but challenging in its own way. I had to abandon most of my favorite writing tricks–double entendre, irony, connotation, cultural reference, messing with clichés, challenging conventions–because all of that is pretty much meaningless to a child! I had to write in a much more basic and direct way. Which kind of felt like trying to write with a different brain!
What, especially, does working with an artist like Julia Mathew to create something for kids do for you creatively?
It was for me, an exercise in delegating and letting go! I anticipated drawing the book myself but the publisher found Julia and went back and forth with her in a very intense way actually, about her images, offering lots of feedback and requesting lots of changes. I, meanwhile, stayed mostly out of it and let them partner to make the artwork unfold. I decided to let go and practice relinquishing control! Another new challenge for me.
You’ve won many awards for your activism through music. As you’ve progressed through your career, do you find that audiences are more or less receptive to music as a force of change?
Hmm. I’m gonna say more! Ha! If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you can make things happen, just by believing in them!
But I think music has always been a vehicle of liberation for people. I have my own way of offering it, but music has surely been setting people free for as long as it has existed. In the exact amount that it needs to. In that sense, I’ve never really been able to distinguish between the activist me and the artist me. They are different manifestations of the same motivating force. It sure is cool to live long enough to see change happen though. And to feel that you were a part of it.
Along those lines, as you’ve been an independent artist your entire career, has it been easier or more difficult to pivot as the music industry has changed?
Well, I guess it gets harder as I get older to stay in touch with the changing game and how it is best played. But I’m not sure I was ever really that good at it! I just had something to prove and refused to be deterred.
The game seems to center around taking pictures and movies of yourself, now. And constantly feeding them into the hungry machine. That part I may go to my grave resenting! Old as I am.
You’ve played Lawrence and Liberty Hall so many times. What does that venue and the town offer up that makes returning worthwhile?
Another moment to share with my beloved fellow humans. A new moment, like none before it!
Ani DiFranco plays Liberty Hall Saturday, October 8. Details on that show here.
