CULT HEROES
ANTI-FOLK SINGER-songwriter, political activist, feminist icon and LGBTQ+ rights campaigner: it shouldn’t be surprising that Ani DiFranco has also been a pioneering force in independent music for over three decades. The seeds of self-reliance were sown within her from an early age.
“My mother wasn’t much for parenting,” the Italian-Canadian recalls of her childhood in Buffalo, New York. “I was encouraged to be independent. As a pretty young kid I remember her saying, ‘I trust your judgement’, and going back to her business. That was the template for me becoming very self-directed.”
By 15, already a veteran of the Buffalo coffee house scene, DiFranco was emancipated from her parents and in control of her own destiny. By 19 she’d started her own label,
Righteous Babe, and released her self-titled first album in 1990. “I didn’t really mean to start a label,” she says. “It was just something I wrote on my first cassettes, but from the idea it became a reality.”
Taking inspiration from folk elders such as Woody Guthrie and her long-time mentor Pete Seeger, with whom she started a penpal relationship in the early ’90s, the songwriter duly built on the stripped guitar and vocals of that debut: over 23 albums in 34 years, she’s won Grammys, duetted with Cyndi Lauper, Kris Kristofferson and Greg Dulli, written and performed with Prince, toured with Bob Dylan, been covered by Chuck D, and agitated for abortion rights, peace and environmental causes. It’s her ability to take these themes and combine them with the personal that unites her disparate, often disenfranchised audience.
Throughout, occasional big money record company offers were rebuffed – as documented on the song The Million You Never Made, from 1995’s Not A Pretty Girl – and eventually her resolve attracted the attention of Prince.
After inviting her to Paisley Park, Prince commented that DiFranco was so indefatigable because “she’s never had a ceiling”. The flip side, of course, is she seldom had a solid floor beneath her either.
“It was always a very shoestring organisation,” she says
