Singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco has been recording and touring for over 35 years. She’s sold millions of records on her own independent label, Righteous Babe Records.
DiFranco is as famous for her music as her politics — her deeply personal, boldly feminist lyrics made her a lightning rod for controversy early in her career, and helped establish her reputation as a music industry rebel. With a new album out last year, as well as a documentary about her life and career, she’s not stopping anytime soon.
DiFranco will perform in Phoenix on Jan. 21, and she joined The Show to discuss more about her music.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: There's this really interesting continuity between a lyric from your first record, which I believe came out in 1990, and a lyric from your, your most recent record, which, which I believe came out last year. And the lyric from the first record is on the song “Work Your Way Out,” where you say, “we're all citizens of the womb until we subdivide into sexes and shades.” And then on the song “More or Less Free” from last year's record, you say, “it seems obvious we're just humans, born more or less free.”
And I was so delighted by this idea, at least in my own mind, that you're still ruminating on this similar idea even 35 years later or whatever it is. Is it fair for me to, to make a connection between those lyrics?
ANI DIFRANCO: Oh sure, yeah, thanks for listening. Those are both deep cuts, old and new, deep cuts. Thanks for really listening in.
Yeah, I mean, I do feel like there is something to my perspective and work that I came here to do that was there when I was born, you know, that that is the case for each of us, and will be there when I die, and hopefully I'll have made some progress along the way.
DINGMAN: That's interesting, this idea of where that awakening happens. Because there, there's another line from your first record that I love, which is, the line is, “I'm singing now because my tear ducts are too tired.” And I wondered when did music become a way of processing everything you were dealing with at that time? You talk in the documentary about how chaotic things were at home and, and how that prompted you to wanna to get out basically. But when did music become the, the vessel?
DIFRANCO: I started playing guitar when I was about 9, and I just latched onto it, like a little leech. I just, I made friends with a troubadour at the guitar shop where I got this first guitar. And he started bringing me around to his gigs and introducing me to all his songwriter friends. And so I was surrounded by people who wrote their own songs and played them, and people whose music was a thing you did, you know, not a thing you bought.
So by 14, I started writing my own songs just to keep up. It became a very potent medicine at that point, ‘cause not only could my hands express the energies and, and, and let the energies, the turmoil out of my body, I could also now say things and sing things that I couldn't find a way to say.
DINGMAN: Yeah, if I'm not mistaken from the, from the doc, you talk about how right around when you were, I think it was 9, you, you tell this amazing story about coming home and finding a note from your mom that basically says she's like retiring from being a parent. And, and I could imagine that putting you in a state where you might be looking for something else to, to go to with what's inside you.
DIFRANCO: Yeah, for sure. I mean, my mom was, you know, she was a good friend, I would say, and, and sort of confidant in the early days. You know, it was never really a parent-kid vibe. So I was very self-sufficient, independent early on, and you know, she had me at almost 40, which was kind of unheard of, you know, 50 years ago.
She was the first woman in her architecture class, you know, at MIT, and she became an architect and she was working long hours and then she also had to do all the cooking and cleaning, you know, so she quit. She hit the wall, you know, she got madder and madder and then she quit.
And, you know, taking care of my little emotions as my family went on its roller coaster, that was kind of my problem. So I figured it out with my guitar.
DINGMAN: Yeah. I really love this, this image that you painted a moment ago when you were talking about that, where you talked about using your hands to express these things that were inside of you. And it makes me think of something that I personally have always been very drawn to about your music, in addition to the lyrics, is the way that you play the guitar. You have such a percussive style, and you just seem to get so much sound out of it.
DIFRANCO: You know, the reason that I can even say that with confidence about my hands telling a story all of their own is because I've had a lot of nights on stage. I mean, I've had a lot of nights on stage, period. And then many of those nights over the last 35 years, I have felt that there's something in the way of my voice. Like there's, I can't lift the veils, like I, I can't access spirit, if you will, with my voice. There's just something mentally in the way. But some of those nights I hear my hands are free. Like where, yeah, you know what, people don't listen to what I'm singing cause I don't know what that is right now, but my hands are telling you the story.
I can picture nights in bars when I was a teenager and playing solo in the corner, and you know, I found, you know, at that point in my life, it's sort of easy to get men's attention in a way that you don't want, you know, but it's not easy to get people's attention to your songs, to your art. It's not easy to get people to stop their conversation and hang and actually really give you, and your little song, you know, the, their full attention.
So I, I can picture myself in these moments, and there were a few that even sort of stick in my memory of discovering things. Like if you make a very loud sound, boom, and then you cut it off and you make a very quiet sound or you leave a big space, and then, you know, that sort of working those contrasts gets people's attention.
DINGMAN: Yeah.
DIFRANCO: And you know what, now that we're talking about it, I think it's also has to do a little bit with power dynamics. You know, because again, like going into the world as a young woman on my own, traveling on my own, playing solo, and mostly it's a man's world, and I'm interfacing with men, and they generally assume power over you.
DINGMAN: Right.
DIFRANCO: And I think that kind of edgy way of playing, you know, that's a little bit “ah!” Kind of startling and aggressive, but then tender, but then whoa, it's like there's something I think in the expression of my hands that was saying, not so fast.
DINGMAN: I'm so glad you brought up this idea of power dynamics because the documentary also talks a lot about the relationship between your music and politics, and you have all these really great quotes about the explicitly political nature of the kinds of songs that you write, but you also say this one thing that I, I can't stop thinking about, which is, and I'm paraphrasing slightly, if I say something in a song and someone hears it, and it makes them feel like they exist, like the feelings that they have exist. Then you say that makes me, Ani, feel like I exist more.
DIFRANCO: Gosh, I mean, I think that's the, the healing power of music. Is that the listener hears themselves reflected and feels affirmed. We need that loop between ourselves and others because I think fundamentally there's no such thing as our self and other.
You feel like suddenly you exist because you've heard yourself coming back at you, and then seeing that happen in you makes me know that I exist, and I'm not alone, and I'm also have a place in the world. And look, here's somebody else who knows exactly what I'm talking about.
DINGMAN: Exactly. Yeah, but this is making me think of that, that lyric of yours that we started out by talking about that, that idea we're all citizens of the womb until we subdivide into sexes and shades. It's almost like we are the same until the world tells us that we're different, and then you're, you as a musician are creating this moment where you're providing this reminder of the sameness.
DIFRANCO: Absolutely. And it's so healing for us to remember that we are one.
DINGMAN: I mean, that is such a beautiful idea and it, it makes me think about something you said when your previous album, “Revolutionary Love,” came out. You were interviewed, I believe, on CBS. And you said that for you, the album is about “showing up to the hard labor of good change with love in your heart.”
But one of the other things that really comes through in the documentary is how much all of this wears on you, the, the heaviness of, you know, the kinds of issues that you address in your music, the number of years that you have been doing this independently, the responsibilities of doing all of that, while also trying to be an engaged and present parent, and how, how exhausting it all is. And in the context of all of that, there's, there's another very haunting line on the, on the new record where you say, “I don't think I'm special, just trying to do a good thing to do, but this is all more than I imagined, more devastating, more surreal, and I just don't know how I feel.”
And I'm wondering what do you make of the progressive movements that, that your music has been such a vital part of in 2025. Do you still think it's, it's important to keep going with, with love in your heart as, as you said before?
DIFRANCO: It's not getting easier and can be so debilitating when you think you've made strides, and then, you know, all your work is undone. It's exhausting. I think that more and more to politically regressive forces have caught on to that, the power of exhausting people.
I sort of see that more and more in my life as an activist, which has gone on for a bunch of decades now. You know, people can demonstrate on the streets of D.C. or cities all over the country, you know, you know, I'm thinking of 2016 on Inauguration Day, the Women's March, you know, which was so massive on Trump's first Inauguration Day, all the Black Lives Matter, you know, racial justice protests. They're sort of ignoring it.
When everybody rises up together and says the truth, and you just wait for it to end and then keep doing what you're doing, it's sort of this surreal, the mechanism, you know, that they have for debilitating social movements of any kind. Just ignore them. It's a new tactic. The idea that you could ignore hundreds of thousands, millions of people, and continue to do business as usual is, is like radical and quite effective.
DINGMAN: Well, so in light of these, these new tactics, do you still feel like love is a, a key part of, of revolution?
DIFRANCO: Absolutely. Oh gosh, it's so hard. I mean, we're so polarized, as we know, we have been taught in many ways overt and subliminal by algorithms that we have yet to get a handle on. You know, I, I just feel like every time we fight each other, the bots win, you know. And we have to support each other. Just we have to step back from the whole process and whatever you've been made to feel while you're sitting there scrolling.
You know, I was driving outside of town the other day. We drove about an hour outside of New Orleans, and we went to the Gulf Coast to run the dogs on the beach over the holiday, and so that's the coast of Mississippi, and I was immediately struck by the Trump signs everywhere. And I felt that tightening in my chest, you know.
And I thought, “wow, maybe what I need to do at this point in my life is to just move here and make it my daily practice to stay open with my neighbors, to talk to them, to love them, to make community with them, to bring them leftovers.” I think those are the kinds of acts that make listening possible, ‘cause first you have to fight the idea that we're enemies.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, not to quote your own lyrics back at you again, but “through the fog, food for thought, through the fog, fuel for dreams.”
DIFRANCO: Amen.
