Ani DiFranco
Ani DiFranco (born September 23, 1970 in Buffalo , New York ) is an American singer-songwriter (initially anti-folk ), label founder (Righteous Babe Records) and political activist (especially feminism ).
biography
The musician was born as Angela Marie DiFranco. Her parents were folk music fans. Her career began when she appeared in bars with her guitar teacher with Beatles covers at the age of nine . When she was 15, her mother moved to the Connecticut countryside and Ani was left in Buffalo.
When she was 18, she started her own record company, Righteous Babe Records, for $ 50 . There she recorded her self-titled debut. Shortly afterwards she moved to New York , where she came into contact with the anti-folk scene, among other things . Her stay there was interrupted by numerous tours. From the beginning she made no secret of her bisexuality . In 1998 she married the sound engineer Andrew Gilchrist, from whom they separated in friendship five years later. She has been married to producer Mike Napolitano since 2009. They have two children together, Petah Lucia (* 2007) and Dante (* 2013). Napolitano has since been involved in the productions of her albums.
DiFranco quickly became popular in a certain scene through her personal image, especially among politically interested college students and other young people who were critical of mainstream culture. DiFranco rose to fame even without the support of a major label and the mainstream press through a network of personal contacts and word of mouth in the mid-1990s. The first fan pages on the Internet appeared in 1994.
The New York musician presented her autobiography at Penguin Random House - Imprint Viking in mid-2019 under the title No Walls and the Recurring Dream .
style
music
Her music ranges between folk , punk and independent . In the course of her career she has incorporated various other styles into her music, e.g. B. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when she increasingly incorporated funky elements. In addition to the classic line-up of bass, guitar and drums, she regularly worked with wind instruments and strings. How this changed older pieces is very well documented on the live album So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter from 2002. DiFranco's guitar style has often been described as " staccato-like ". Another important aspect is her virtuosity at fast fingerpicking and generally her excellent command of the acoustic guitar.
Texts
Ani DiFranco's texts are demanding. She works with alliteration , puns in general and metaphors as well as with a more or less obvious irony.
Much of their material is autobiographical, in the tradition of the singer-songwriters' personal lyrics. Her songs are implicitly or explicitly political and deal with social issues such as racism , sexism , sexual abuse , homophobia , the right to abortion , poverty and war .
politics
DiFranco also spoke out on political issues outside of her music. For example, she supported Ralph Nader outside of the so-called swing states during the US presidential election campaign in 2000 . In 2004 she supported the Democratic candidate , Dennis Kucinich , in his election campaign.
Righteous Babe Records
The success of her record label , Righteous Babe Records (RBR), based in her hometown of Buffalo, is also noteworthy. As her own label boss, DiFranco has absolute artistic freedom, including the ability to release albums whenever she wants. References to this independence from large record labels come among others. a. in the songs The Million You Never Made and Napoleon .
In addition to her own more than twenty albums, including a number of recordings of her concerts, she has released productions by Andrew Bird , Arto Lindsay , Mike Silverman as the one-man band That 1 Guy, New Folk singer-songwriters such as Anaïs Mitchell and Toshi Reagan, Animal Prufrock, the funk rock singer Nona Hendryx, who emerged from Patti LaBelles Doo-Wop - girl group The Bluebelles, as well as the author Sekou Sundiata, a teacher of DiFranco, and Buddy Wakefield, the two-time winner of the Individual World Poetry Slam (2004 and 2005).
Collaboration with other well-known artists
DiFranco has worked with Cyndi Lauper , Dar Williams , Lenine , Utah Phillips and Maceo Parker and his son and rapper Corey Parker. She is also on the two albums Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic (1999) and Rave In2 the Joy Fantastic (2001) by Prince in the song Eye Love U Eye Do not Trust U Anymore but represented.
In 2016 she set to music the rediscovered Woody Guthrie text Old Man Trump with Ryan Harvey and Tom Morello, which was reported in the media as part of Donald Trump's presidential candidacy .
Others
Ani DiFranco is a figurehead of the American New Folk movement. She became a role model for many singer-songwriters such as B. Lorna Bracewell or Dota .
The US songwriter Dan Bern dedicated the song Talkin 'Ani DiFranco's Mom Blues to DiFranco . The Swedish singer Lars Winnerbäck covered DiFrancos You had time on his album Singel under the title Du hade tid .
Discography
Albums
| year | title |
Top ranking, total weeks, awardChartsChart placements (Year, title, rankings, weeks, awards, notes) |
Remarks |
|---|---|---|---|
 US
|
|||
| 1996 | Dilate |
US87 (4 weeks) US |
|
| 1997 | Living in clip |
US59  (5 weeks)US |
Double live album
|
| 1998 | Little Plastic Castle |
US22 (10 weeks) US |
|
| 1999 | Up Up Up Up Up Up |
US29 (7 weeks) US |
|
| To the teeth |
US76 (2 weeks) US |
||
| 2001 | Revelling / Reckoning |
US50 (6 weeks) US |
Double album
|
| 2002 | So Much Shouting / So Much Laughter |
US32 (4 weeks) US |
Live album
|
| 2003 | Evolve |
US30 (7 weeks) US |
|
| 2004 | Educated Guess |
US37 (3 weeks) US |
|
| 2005 | Knuckle Down |
US49 (5 weeks) US |
|
| 2006 | Reprieve |
US46 (4 weeks) US |
|
| 2007 | Canon |
US89 (1 week) US |
|
| 2008 | Red Letter Year |
US55 (2 weeks) US |
|
| 2012 | Which Side Are You On? |
US26 (1 week) US |
|
| 2014 | Allergic to water |
US155 (1 week) US |
|
| 2017 | Binary |
US192 (1 week) US |
More albums
- Demo Tape , 1989, unreleased
- Ani DiFranco , 1990
- Not So Soft , 1991
- Imperfectly , 1992
- Puddle Dive , 1993
- Like I Said: Songs 1990-91 , 1993
- Out of Range , 1994
- Women in (E) motion , 1994, live recording produced by Radio Bremen
- Not a Pretty Girl , 1995
- More Joy, Less Shame , 1996, EP with u. a. a recording with a symphony orchestra ("Joyful Girl")
- The Past Didn't Go Anywhere , 1996, with Utah Phillips
- Little Plastic Remixes , 1999, Remix EP
- Fellow Workers , 1999, with Utah Phillips
- To the Teeth , 1999
- Swing Set , 2000, EP with live covers by Bob Dylan , Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs .
- Buffalo , 2013
Video albums
- Render: Spanning Time with Ani DiFranco , 2002
- Trust , 2004
- Live at Babeville , 2008
literature
- Jörg Scheller , "Freedom that I avoid: Ani DiFranco and the other America", in: Peter Nachtnebel (ed.), For the Sake of the Song: America's new songwriters , Mainz: Ventil Verlag, 2009. ISBN 978-3931555672
- No Walls and the Recurring Dream , Autobiography, 320 pp., Viking, New York 2019, ISBN 9780735225176 .
Web links
- Homepage of the label Righteous Babe
- Works by and about Ani DiFranco in the catalog of the German National Library
swell
- ↑ No Walls and the Recurring Dream , penguinrandomhouse.com, accessed July 31, 2019
- ↑ iWPS 2005 Crowns Buddy Wakefield ... Again ( Memento of the original from April 26, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Announcement on the website of the Poetry Slam, Inc. Documentation, (viewed on March 29, 2014)
- ↑ Chart discography USA
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | DiFranco, Ani |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American songwriter, guitarist and singer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 23, 1970 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Buffalo , New York , United States |