Ani Difranco
Ani Difranco
Ani DiFrancois an American singer, multi-instrumentalist, poet, songwriter and businesswoman. She has released more than 20 albums and is widely considered a feminist icon. DiFranco has received positive feedback from critics for much of her career...
ProfessionFolk Singer
Date of Birth23 September 1970
CityBuffalo, NY
running trying lines
and I try to draw the line but it ends up running down the middle of me most of the time.
girl pretty-girl want
I am not a pretty girl. I don't want to be a pretty girl. No, I want to be more than a pretty girl.
ocean swim ships
I can jump ship and swim-- that the ocean will hold me, that there's got to be more than this boat I'm in.
girl dirty knowing
Imagine you're a girl, just trying to finally come clean, knowing full well they'd prefer you were dirty and smiling.
real believe scare
What bugs me is that you believe what you're saying. What bothers me is that you don't know how you feel. What scares me is that while you're telling me stories, you actually believe that they are real.
challenges want bed
If you want to challenge the system, don't go to bed with it.
running eye hands
Like how could you do nothing, and say, 'I'm doing my best.' How could you take almost everything, and then come back for the rest? How could you beg me to stay, reach out your hands and plead, and then pack up your eyes and run away as soon as I agreed?
mean eye love-is
You rhapsodize about beauty, and my eyes glaze. Everything that I love is ugly. I mean really, you would be amazed. Just do me a favor, it's the least that you can do, just don't treat me like I am something that happened to you.
song writing color
I noticed with older songs that I perform that I'm coming from a different place with them now...it mutates the vibe and even the meaning of the same words when you have a different spirit, if the person singing is different. I like that, to be able to sing an emotionally wrought song from a more centered place, or to sing an eager, youthful song from a more experienced place. It kind of colors the songs differently, and it keeps them fresh.
wise writing air
My writing just kind of exists out there in the air-it's all sort of intended as spoken, or sung, word. So, to commit them to the page...that way was kind of intimidating to me, yet intriguing, to try to reflect the rhythms and connotations and emotions that you can deliver, speaking-wise, on a page.
song writing years
These days, I find I'm applying a little more patience to my process. If I look back on my work, I can see those songs I bailed on could have been better, that had those great two verses and then I kind of coasted from there. These days, if a song is giving me trouble, I put it aside and pick it up later, and keep doing that, for a year if I have to, until it takes shape.
song writing guitar
These days I keep a journal, so I'm constantly sketching down my thoughts, or lines that come to me...ideas for songs. And then when I have a moment to myself, I'll sit down with my guitar and open my journal, and start kind of massaging things together, and see if a song takes shape. Or sometimes, I'll just be hanging out with my guitar and come up with a chord progression or a lick, and that'll sort of sit around for a while waiting to marry itself to some words. So it's sort of haphazard and it's like...junk culture. I go around finding shiny objects and I glue them together laughs.
war media people
Before Katrina, you didn't see criticism of the Bush administration in the media. Here they are, stealing elections, enacting illegal wars, huge crimes against humanity and democracy, and you didn't even see criticism. It wasn't until Katrina that people started to come down on them.
night america drug
There's a certain window of time in the middle of the night out in Middle America where there's no bar open and nothing on TV. If you don't want to do too many drugs, you have to start bodily mutilation.