Ani Difranco

Time to tell you a little bit about my latest interest in music...

I've been familiar with Ani since I was a teenager but I never delved all that deeply into her catalogue because, to be perfectly honest, I was afraid of being perceived as a poseur. It was great music but it was tapped into some seriously haunted stuff, I felt like I had no right to empathize with what Ani had apparently been going through. Sure, I had struggled with intense suicidal depression since about the age of 7, but that's grunge pain, Nirvana pain, melancholy, imbalanced chemicals. Ani Difranco's music is like, god... abuse, persecution, what it feels like to be a pariah, the experience of living on your own.

To put it bluntly, I have trouble imagining that Kurt Cobain was ever actually 27 years old. Everything about him makes him seem like a teenager. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Ani feels like she was born 35, her music reeks of experience and the complex maturities inherent to dealing with the adult world. As a naive teenager I felt like listening to Ani might expose me for the mental infant I was, wholly unaware of what the real world was or how to form coherent, consequential responses to it.

Those days now long since obscured by the years, I've been lucky enough to grow up. I'm not that infant anymore, and now I can resonate sincerely and unashamedly with Ani's music. And while it's surely no surprise, I'm pleased to find her legendary status is most assuredly deserved.

Since we've already hit on the conceptual side, we can start into Ani's music from a musical standpoint. First, I want to say, I love acoustic music. But I'm not always fond of stereotypical acoustic music, that lite-rock, crooning stuff. Having a few ballads is bloody fantastic, but I would never listen extensively to an artist like James Taylor, where it's pretty much all ballads. It's just overkill, you need a balance for those things.

Ani's music is almost all acoustic, but it's not at all in the lite-rock crooning category. You can see in her the very best part of Neil Young's acoustic side. Not the "Heart of Gold," Harvest Moon, Comes a Time, Prairie Wind side, no. It's the "Will to Love," "Ambulance Blues," "Broken Arrow," "Last Trip To Tulsa" side, unhinged and biting, personal to an almost embarrassing extent. This is the incredibly unique wavelength Ani surfs on.

Ballads account for less than half of Ani's output, and even when she does ballads, they're not gooey romance tales, they're brooding 8 minute ruminations, psychotic and poignant. Hell, even her hit single, "32 Flavors," is lyrically abstract and 6 minutes long.

And then we get to the other side of the coin, the bulk of what she does, these acoustic songs that don't really fit any mold. First of all, she's a fucking amazing guitarist. The things she plays sound complex as living Hell, like that "Knock on Wood" song by Justin King. All kinds of harmonics flying everywhere and sliding hands and it just sounds like she's a virtuoso without even trying.

And then there's the incredible soulfulness of the grooves. Technical guitar playing tends to lack soul and groove, but Ani has mastered that as well. She controls her melodies almost like a talented metal band does, pulling down the tempo and fleshing out the nuances until it becomes a new melody. Some of her breakdowns would make Pantera jealous.

Basically Ani Difranco is unprecedentedly amazing. It's hard to imagine someone like her could exist all in one, with the acute emotional depth, the virtuosic playing, and even the good sense to control her own career two decades before that mode would become fashionable in the internet age.