Ani DiFranco Takes Her Guitar and Voice in a Radical New Direction

Ani DiFranco, Photo: Anthony MulcahyAni DiFranco achieved her iconic status by relentlessly storming the 1990s, during which she played well over 3,000 shows, always taking the stage with an acoustic guitar and fake nails electric-taped to her fingers to achieve her kinetic rhythms. For every year of that decade she released an album on her self-owned indie label, Righteous Babe. Since then, she’s continued to tirelessly record and tour, while also expanding her reach—as an activist, impresario, collaborator, parent, and business owner.

DiFranco’s latest release, Unprecedented Sh!t, is a stunner. Nearly every sound on the album—her 23rd—started as a vocal or a guitar, but producer BJ Burton (Bon Iver, Sylvan Esso) and DiFranco have worked them into a vast, dynamic landscape. Much has been said about the percussive attack of DiFranco’s playing, but the depth of feel, time, and sway in her guitar approach is highlighted here, as well as a profound sense of playfulness that is a hallmark of mastery. And her vocal phrasing, which has always been her secret weapon, is cast into sharp relief by Burton’s expert shadings.

I first met DiFranco in 1994 at a folk festival where we were both booked. She brought her Alvarez guitar to a 30-second line check on the main stage and proceeded to tear everybody’s head off. The next day she and I did a side-stage song swap together with Dar Williams and Greg Brown. Since then I’ve opened the occasional tour for DiFranco, and she produced my 2016 record Are You Listening?, which was released on Righteous Babe. I recently caught up with her via phone to talk shop: the new record, writing, touring, her love of tenor and rubber bridge guitars, and the meaning of the term umwelt.

Photo: Danny ClinchLet’s just dive in. What was your first guitar? 

It was a three-quarter-size piece of plywood. I mean, it wasn’t probably literally plywood. Steel-string. I was nine. I can sort of picture it: the guitar had a bubble on the face of it. I think my parents got it at discount because the face had an egg-sized bubble. 

A bubble, like someone put it too near a heat lamp? 

Yeah, a nice little special bubble. That was my guitar, and I sold it, probably when I was 12. I sold all of my possessions in order to go to camp. I wanted to go to camp! I wish I still had that guitar, just because, but . . . long gone.

So, jumping from nine-year-old Ani in 1980s Buffalo to grown-up Ani in 2020s New Orleans: this new record feels like a radical departure, and one of the hippest things anybody has done with just a guitar and a voice in a long time. Explain yourself! What is going on?

For years, I’ve wanted to explore the alternative world of recording that everyone lives in now, the world of machines. Like, you and I are the only two people left without Auto-Tune on our vocals, right? Everything goes through the machines or is generated by the machines. The sound of modern records is the sound of digital technology and all of its possibilities. So I really wanted to find somebody who was living in this modern world, who I could partner with, to finally make a record that was not just setting a microphone up in front of my face and my guitar. So: I found BJ Burton, and basically I recorded the songs at home, sent them to him, and he fucked with them. The end. 

Seriously, this is a contrasty album, from super simple to the stratosphere and then back to simple, but that stratosphere business—basically those soundscapes are built out of my voice and guitar. 

That’s what got me. It sounds nothing like a guitar or voice.

Yeah! The album opens with that sort of mute-y keyboard sound: that’s my guitar. The second song is this kind of atonal, distorted, rhythmic thing: that’s my guitar. I did some overdubs myself, you know, drumming on my guitar, some vocal weirdness, pulled out a keyboard or two. But with this simple stuff I sent him, he used all those machines. I don’t know what they are, where they come from, or where they go, but from those ingredients, he made all those sounds.

For three and a half decades you’ve toured and recorded with duo, trio, and larger band combos. Yet somehow this record, with just voice, guitar, and sonic manipulation, feels like a summation of every other sound you’ve inhabited. 

That’s exactly how it feels to me: like I’m at the end of the road of just churning out Ani albums—Ani songs about Ani’s life and feelings. I still love playing music, and I still love performing, but in terms of songwriting, I don’t feel motivated to share my thoughts and feelings way I used to. 

Scratch all that out, because I’m not going to go on a farewell tour and then show up again two years later. But it does feel like that. And that’s why, when we were looking at the graphics for the album, I liked just a simple portrait of me, black and white, Xeroxed like we did it back in 1990, coming full circle from the first album. Like, this is the end of a series.

Photo: Danny ClinchNowadays you have two sound engineers, a guitar tech, a merch seller, a driver, and a tour manager. Which came first?

A sound guy! I mean, it was desperate, desperate times. I was going to quit. I was so frustrated with sound guys at clubs—the attitude and territorial-ness and the sexism . . . just exhausting. The amount of “nice” you have to show to some guy because he’s standing between you and your listeners. Every night a new version of this, and you’ve got to beg him to not get in the way of what you’re trying to do! That was really getting me down. 

I think I wrote about it in my memoir. Scot Fisher, my manager at the time, just straight up said, “Dude, you have to sell T-shirts!” But I was against selling anything but the music itself. T-shirts made me feel commercial and icky. I was an anti-capitalist punk kid! But he was like, “If you sell T-shirts, you can have a sound guy.” And I was like, “Do it! Put my name on it! Put my face, naked pictures of me . . . Get me a sound guy!” 

Then I had a sound guy, but I was still a one-guitar operation, my own Sherpa. I was my own driver. But then [came] a merch seller and a guitar tech, and “I’m gonna bring my tenor. Oh, I’m gonna change my tuning every song.”

When I’ve toured with you, I’ve noticed how happy your crew is. They’re all business but also completely at ease, and the crew at the venue always relaxes and cheers up.

Yeah. I mean Steve Schrems, who I traveled with for ten years, his motto was “Kill ’em with kindness!” You know, women are kind of versed in how to get by in the patriarchy with kindness. But it’s a rare man, like Steve, who just doesn’t need to puff up and play the hierarchy game every step of the journey. Those are the dudes that I’ve searched high and low for, who can go in all humble countenance and tolerance and kill them with kindness, until they’re with you and not against you. 

That reminds me of the line from “New Bible”: “Cooperation trumps competition.” Speaking of your songs: beginning with “Spinning Room,” this new record grapples with our apocalyptic moment, our politics, our culture. And then the last song, “The Knowing,” is a musical setting of a children’s book you wrote, reminding children that underneath all the labels is the inner light of consciousness. What journey brought you to that marvelous pivot?

I feel like some shimmering and ever-evolving awareness was always in me, always in my songs. You know, right from the beginning, it was like, you can exhaust yourself describing and defining me. At the end of whatever day I’m gonna prove you’re wrong. I’m gonna outlast all your stereotypes. I’m gonna be bigger and more changeable and more complex than you and all your labels put together. So go ahead, knock yourself out.

In the song “Boots of a Soldier” you’re weaving together the stories of a guitar, a pair of boots, and a tree.

It’s about just sitting there, being so awestruck by the stories that are surrounding any of us at any moment. For instance, I can’t even imagine what this tree has seen, let alone this guitar from 1960. Where has it been, and who held it? And these boots on my feet . . . It’s just mind-blowing, the depth and the breadth of the stories all around you at any given moment. 

I’ve been reading An Immense World, by Ed Yong, about understanding the world through the senses of animals. So, for instance, what we call objective reality, everything that we think we know, is so subjective, so specific to our tiny experience. This ant that’s walking up to me right now as I sit on the porch is experiencing a whole other universe, all the information coming to it, through senses that we don’t have, with a physiology that we can’t even imagine. 

Some German entomologist or botanist—some German nature dude—came up with this term umwelt. It means the universe that you live within, specific to your species. Most birds see thousands more colors than we do, because their eyes are designed differently. What is their world like? Scallops have hundreds of eyes. What is their world like? Who knew any of this? And so the world, how we see it, how we experience it, how we think it works, is just a very tiny slice of how it must actually be. It’s a world of infinite possibility. So, getting back to the song: any single idea you have is by definition reductive, right? 

In light of that, there’s a lyric in the song “Baby Roe”: “keeps coming down to the same shitty interface that we’re using.” The interface you’re referring to: is it the human mind?

Yes! But not just the mind—the worst aspect of the mind, the ego. We’re being deluded and led round by our egos. Your idea of you as “Peter Mulvey” and me as “Ani DiFranco,” that we’re separate, autonomous, and very special to ourselves: all of that is a dream, and kind of meaningless at the end of the day.

You’ve lived in New Orleans since the early 2000s. How has that city and its musical culture seeped into you over the years?

I have two children who are New Orleanians, born of their New Orleanian father, my husband, Nappy [producer Mike Napolitano]. Nutrients and life force don’t just pass one direction in the umbilical cord—cells come the other way, and it’s well known that a mother will have their children’s DNA in them. I think my children, they’re all up in New Orleans, and it’s in me. 

Just being there and being a part of the environment, the flora, the fauna, the humidity, the weather, the people, the culture, the vibe. If you’re open to vibe, it comes in, you know? It says, “Whoa, why such a hurry?” And it says, “Look a little deeper.” And it says, “It’s not that simple.” It holds comedy and tragedy up in front of your face on a daily basis. It’s a city that just . . . I can’t even tell you. It’s too deep in me, what I’ve learned from it and how it’s changed me. I know I would be a different being if I hadn’t lived the last 20 years in New Orleans.

Let’s talk about some of your instruments. The tenor guitar is a big part of your voice as a guitarist. How does that instrument speak to you?

My friend Scotty, in Buffalo, ran this guitar store where I used to hang out, and he found vintage instruments. Before the internet, you know? This was Buffalo, so it was hard to sell anything, because nobody’s got any money. It’s not some cosmopolitan city with all kinds of people looking for vintage instruments. But he would find these things, and he would call me first. He’d be like, “Check this out, it’s a tenor guitar! You tune it like a fiddle.” And I was like, I’m going to do it my own way. And off I went. 

Turns out, it’s less sparkly than a regular acoustic, which I like. There are way fewer high-end overtones, which pretty much never were my favorite. My whole life with an acoustic guitar was like, “Take all the high end away! Give me more low end! More!” [Tenor guitar] is much more like a banjo. It’s honky and it’s tactile. So there’s a real nice place that it fits in a mix or in a band onstage.

Lately you’ve been using rubber bridges.

Yes. “Spinning Room,” right off the top, that’s a rubber bridge. I definitely am getting way into rubber bridges. I’m so into the spaces between the notes, which is why I generally fingerpick and don’t strum. And with a rubber bridge, the notes die off before your very eyes—the notes never get up around your face. 

The rubber bridge guitar is a Kay, a plywood Sears & Roebuck. The bridge was replaced with a block of wood with a piece of rubber over it, and the strings are flat wound, tuned baritone.

It strikes me that, for someone who has so much gear and uses it so expertly, you’re not a gear nerd. It’s all just so you can grab something and go make art. 

Photo: Anthony MulcahyGear nerd? No. I only learn as much as I have to at any moment to get it done, you know? I’ll forget recording software the minute the job is done! I mean, I drive in the studio a lot, because I’m solo a lot. But I’m over it. I’ve realized that my brain space, my energy, is finite, and bringing in people who really know how to use this gear is just so much cooler. Not only that, they come in with ideas and creativity of their own. 

Once on the radio I heard someone ask you, “If all your songs had to disappear off the face of the earth, except one, which song would you keep?” And you instantly said, “Get rid of them all. I’ll write more.” Hats off! That is the answer. So, have you ever gone to make a set list and just thought, “You’re not getting ‘32 Flavors.’ I’m just playing new stuff.”

I’ve done it all over the years, and then watched what happened! [laughs] I remember going to the Rocky Mountain Folks Fest one year and playing all this new shit, and it’s raining, and people are like, “Really?” I was like a scientist: “I’m experimenting with you. Don’t you know that this is all data? I’m assembling data as I walk the earth by saying stuff and seeing how the world sees it—or not.” 

But at this point—maybe it’s the mom in me—I’m like, “You know what? I love you, sweetheart, and I’m so grateful that you made the effort to come to be with me, so I’m not going to just serve asparagus!”

What She PlaysAni DiFranco’s touring guitars include a 1950s Gibson LG-50, a 1970s Gibson LG-3, a 1980s Epiphone Caballero FT-30, and an Alvarez MSD1 travel guitar. These instruments are set up with D’Addario NB1356 nickel bronze strings and amplified with Fishman Matrix Infinity VT pickups.

Her tenor guitar is a Cromwell G4 archtop, with D’Addario EFT16 Flat Top strings (the middle four of the six-string set) and a Fishman archtop pickup.

She plays a one-off Alvarez YBM7C baritone with D’Addario custom phosphor bronze strings (.016–.070) and a Fishman Matrix Infinity VT pickup.

Her rubber bridge guitars include an old Kay in baritone tuning, with a Lollar surface-mount Gold Foil pickup, and “the Owl”—an “old junk guitar” restored by Garrett Burton of Old Country Strings and set up with a Seymour Duncan Hot Rails pickup. The rubber bridge guitars use D’Addario flat-wound strings.

She plays through a Rivera Sedona S115 amp and a Magnatone Twilighter amp from the ’60s, which she calls “the only amp I know of with true vibrato, watery and complex.” —PM