Bio
The set list may change every single night, but there are certain sounds you can safely expect to hear during just about any Ani DiFranco show: Ani’s innovative guitar tunings and signature percussive finger picking, of course, along with soaring vocals that slide effortlessly from a whisper to a roar and back again. But that’s just the action on the stage; out in the house you’ll invariably hear a crowd, sometimes screaming with one giant voice, sometimes singing along to songs that might be so new they haven’t even been recorded yet. Other times there’s no sound at all, because everyone in the room is hanging on Ani’s every word. There will be a lot of laughter, too—Ani’s own, and everybody else’s. And if you listen very, very carefully, you may even hear a first-time audience member’s jaw drop.
Ani has been stunning and delighting listeners ever since she was a teenager in Buffalo, New York, playing bars she wasn’t old enough to enter. During her high-school years she studied dance, began to paint, wrote poems (many of which later became song lyrics), and cut a lot of classes. Shortly after she was able to drive herself to gigs, those gigs started spreading farther and farther out of town. More and more people heard the songs she was writing and singing, and found they could identify with her deeply personal thoughts about the power dynamics of romance, the politics of family life, the choices she watched her friends make, and the general state of things in her hometown and her country of origin. After just about every one of her funny, outspoken, intimate gigs, she'd leave behind a fresh batch of converts eager to spread the word to everyone they knew, via cassettes at first and later CDs.
The early 1990s brought a temporary relocation to New York and classes in poetry and politics at the New School, but her real education still happened on the road. She was a live performer first and foremost, but that didn’t stop her from putting out albums any time she’d gathered up enough new material to warrant one. Rather than waiting for some A&R bigwig to sign her, Ani simply created her own label, Righteous Babe Records, in her hometown, eventually turning down legions of potential deals when she realized they had nothing to offer that she couldn't provide herself. Over the next decade, she performed solo, with one or two other musicians, and with a full band, then returned to the more stripped-down sound of one woman and one guitar for a while. At the same time, she began to learn her way around the recording studio, gradually developing her own unique means to convey the spontaneity, intensity and wit of her live concerts on disc—entrusting the folks back in Buffalo (helmed by manager and label president Scot Fisher) to handle the day-to-day operation of the company.
These days, the self-described “Little Folksinger” is packing joints like Carnegie Hall and amphitheaters around the world, though she still makes each venue she plays feel as cozy as a living room and as sweaty as a neighborhood dive. That DIY label of hers now has a new headquarters in a long-neglected Buffalo church that was slated for demolition and is now a combination performance venue and contemporary arts center. RBR is home to all of Ani's CDs along with an eclectic hand-picked roster of artists whose music is as unclassifiable and unpredictable as her own. Meanwhile, over the years Ani has collaborated with Prince, Cyndi Lauper, Dar Williams, the Twilight Singers, Jeff Klein, Bruce Cockburn, John Gorka, and Maceo Parker on their albums; she has produced recordings by Hamell on Trial, Dan Bern, Utah Phillips, Janis Ian, Michael Meldrum, and others; she’s performed orchestral versions of her music with the Buffalo Philharmonic and had her songs covered by the likes of Dave Matthews and Chuck D. Along the way, she has inspired countless other musicians to rewrite the rules of the recording industry by striving for self-sufficiency and refusing to allow art to be subsumed by commerce. Small wonder, then, that Ani made CMJ’s list of the 25 most influential artists of the last 25 years, taking her place alongside U2, Nirvana, the Pixies, and Radiohead. Here’s part of what the magazine had to say: “Iconoclastic and recklessly driven people like her are far more dangerous to the recording industry than some straw man like ‘downloading.’”
Dangerous? Only if you’re not happy with business as usual. And Ani’s career has been anything but “business as usual.” Nor does the music she makes fit into typical recordstore bins like folk or rock; it’s informed by jazz, funk, hip-hop, experimental and electronic sounds, and much, much more. Like everything Ani does, it defies description and demands attention.
source: http://www.righteousbabe.com/ani/bio.asp
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