Background and career
Angela Maria "Ani" DiFranco (; born September 23, 1970) is an American-Canadian singer-songwriter. She has released more than 20 albums. Her music has been classified as folk rock and alternative rock, although it has additional influences from punk, funk, hip-hop and jazz. She has released all her albums on her own record label, Righteous Babe. DiFranco supports many social and political movements by performing benefit concerts, appearing on benefit albums and speaking at rallies. Through the Righteous Babe Foundation, she has backed grassroots cultural and political organizations supporting causes including abortion rights and LGBTQ visibility. She counts American folk singer and songwriter Pete Seeger among her mentors. DiFranco released a memoir, No Walls and the Recurring Dream, on May 7, 2019, via Viking Books, which reached The New York Times Best Seller list. On February 9, 2024, DiFranco made her Broadway debut in Hadestown as Persephone, reprising the role she played in the concept album of the same name.
DiFranco was born in Buffalo, New York, on September 23, 1970, the daughter of Elizabeth (Ross) and Dante Americo DiFranco, who had met while attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her father was of Italian descent, and her mother was from Montreal. DiFranco started playing Beatles covers at local bars and busking with her guitar teacher, Michael Meldrum, at the age of nine. By 14 she was writing her own songs. She played them at bars and coffee houses throughout her teens. DiFranco graduated from the Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts high school at 16 and began attending classes at Buffalo State College. She was living by herself, having moved out of her mother's apartment after she became an emancipated minor when she was 15.
DiFranco started her own record company, Righteous Babe Records, in 1989 at age 19. She released her self-titled debut album in the winter of 1990, shortly after relocating to New York City. There, she took poetry classes at The New School, where she met poet Sekou Sundiata, who was to become a friend and mentor. She toured steadily for the next 15 years, pausing only to record albums. Appearances at Canadian folk festivals and increasingly larger venues in the U.S. reflected her increasing popularity on the North American folk and roots scene. Throughout the early and mid-1990s DiFranco toured solo and also as a duo with Canadian drummer Andy Stochansky. In September 1995, DiFranco participated in a concert at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland Ohio, inaugurating the opening of the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York City. She later released a CD on Righteous Babe of the concert Til We Outnumber Em featuring artists such as DiFranco, Billy Bragg, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Arlo Guthrie, Indigo Girls, Dave Pirner, Tim Robbins, and Bruce Springsteen, with 100 percent of proceeds going to the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum educational department. In 1996, bassist Sara Lee joined the touring group, whose live rapport is showcased on the 1997 album Living in Clip. DiFranco would later release Lee's solo album Make It Beautiful on Righteous Babe. In 1998, Stochansky left to pursue a solo career as a singer-songwriter. A new touring ensemble consisting of Jason Mercer on bass, Julie Wolf on keyboards, and Daren Hahn on drums, augmented at times by a horn section, accompanied DiFranco on tour between 1998 and 2002. The 1990s were a period of heightened exposure for DiFranco, as she continued playing ever larger venues around the world and attracted international attention of the press, including cover stories in Spin, Ms., and Magnet, as well as appearances on MTV and VH1. Her playfully ironic cover of the Bacharach/David song "Wishin' and Hopin'" appeared under the opening titles of the film My Best Friend's Wedding. She guest-starred on a 1998 episode of the Fox sitcom King of the Hill, as the voice of Peggy's feminist guitar teacher, Emily. Beginning in 1999, Righteous Babe Records began releasing albums by other artists including Sara Lee, Sekou Sundiata, Arto Lindsay, Bitch and Animal, That One Guy, Utah Phillips, Hamell on Trial, Andrew Bird, Kurt Swinghammer, Buddy Wakefield, Anaïs Mitchell and Nona Hendryx. On September 11, 2001, DiFranco was in Manhattan and later penned the poem "Self Evident" about the experience. The poem was featured in the book It's a Free Country: Personal Freedom in America After September 11. The poem's title also became the name of DiFranco's first book of poetry, released exclusively in Italy by Minimum Fax. It was later also featured in Verses, a book of her poetry published in the U.S. by Seven Stories press. DiFranco has written and performed many spoken-word pieces throughout her career, and was showcased as a poet on the HBO series Def Poetry in 2005. Since her 2005 release Knuckle Down (co-produced by Joe Henry) DiFranco's touring band and recordings have featured bass player Todd Sickafoose and in turns other musicians such as Allison Miller, Andy Borger, Herlin Riley, and Terence Higgins on drums and Mike Dillon on percussion and vibes. On September 11, 2007, she released the first retrospective of her career, a two-disc compilation entitled Canon, and simultaneously a retrospective collection of poetry, Verses. On September 30, 2008, she released Red Letter Year.
In 2009, DiFranco appeared at Pete Seeger's 90th birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden, debuting her revamped version of the 1930s labor anthem "Which Side Are You On?" in a duet with Bruce Cockburn and also duetting with Kris Kristofferson on the folk classic "There's a Hole in the Bucket". DiFranco released an album on January 17, 2012, ¿Which Side Are You On?. It includes collaborations with Pete Seeger, Ivan Neville, Cyril Neville, Skerik, Adam Levy, Righteous Babe recording artist Anaïs Mitchell, C. C. Adcock, and a host of New Orleans–based horn players known for their work in such outfits as Galactic, Bonerama, and Rebirth Brass Band. In 2014, she released her eighteenth album, Allergic to Water. In 2017, she released her nineteenth, Binary. On May 7, 2019, DiFranco released a memoir, No Walls and the Recurring Dream, via Viking Books. It is described as a "coming-of-age story". In 2021, she released the album Revolutionary Love, which was largely inspired by Valarie Kaur's book See No Stranger.
DiFranco came out as bisexual in her twenties, and has written songs about love and sex with women and men. She addressed the controversy about her sexuality in the song "In or Out" on the album Imperfectly (1992). However, in 2015 she told the blog GoPride.com that she was "not so queer anymore, but definitely a woman-centered woman and just a human rights-centered artist." In a 2019 interview with Jezebel, she stated that she preferred the term "queer" because "bisexual" "always sounded very medical, like something you do to a frog in 9th grade science or something", and further added that "the irony is I'm pretty fuckin' hetero, which is unfortunate for me because many of my deepest connections are with women. But, naw, I just like what's in boys' pants better." In 1998, she married her sound engineer Andrew Gilchrist in a Unitarian Universalist service in Canada. DiFranco and Gilchrist divorced in 2003. In 1990, she wrote "Lost Woman Song", inspired by abortions she had at ages eighteen and twenty. DiFranco's father died in the summer of 2004. In July 2005, DiFranco developed tendinitis and took a nine-month hiatus from touring. In January 2007, DiFranco gave birth to her first child, a daughter, at her Buffalo home. She married the child's father, Mike Napolitano, also her regular producer, in 2009. In an interview on September 13, 2012, DiFranco mentioned that she was pregnant with her second child. In April 2013, she gave birth to her second child, a son. She has resided in the Bywater, New Orleans, neighborhood since 2008. DiFranco signed the October 2023 Artists4Ceasefire open letter to Joe Biden calling for a ceasefire during the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. She has described herself as an atheist. On the subject of religion, DiFranco has stated:
Well, I'm not a religious person myself. I'm an atheist. I think religion serves a lot of different purposes in people's lives, and I can recognize the value of that, you know, the value of ceremony, the value of community, or even just having a forum to get together and talk about ideas, about morals – that's a cool concept. But then, of course, institutional religions are so problematic. DiFranco has spoken critically of cancel culture, saying it is "just gonna get us nowhere" and "The human family can't divorce each other". DiFranco herself has received criticism for planning a 2013 songwriting retreat at Nottoway, a former slave plantation. She cancelled the retreat three days after the news broke, writing on her website, "I needed a wake-up call and you gave it to me." In a 2019 interview, she said of her choices at the time, "I should have found the ultimate humility to put down my own hurt, and all of the misconceptions or mis-truths out there. You have to make yourself accountable. There's a greater pain that's bigger than me, and it's more important." She wrote in her memoir that she "[sympathized] with both sides" regarding the controversial trans-exclusionary policies of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. In a 2019 interview, she elaborated on this statement, discussing her perception that cisgender women were being "asked again ... to move over and make room for somebody else," and later expressed that she understood the difficulty "for anybody outside of a very specific group to experience it the way that group does," saying that "maybe [women's spaces] should be a little more [inclusive]". DiFranco is the subject of the 2024 documentary film 1-800-On-Her-Own.
