DiFranco Slows Down But Doesn't Mellow Out

For most of her Grammy-winning music career, Ani DiFranco has been amazingly prolific. Between 1990 and 2007, she pumped out a new album, on average, once a year. She also toured the country incessantly, playing sold-out shows to crowds adoring of her politically- and morally-charged lyrics and folk-rock style.

Those days are over—sort of.

Ms. DiFranco, now 40, married, and the mother of a 3-year-old, is not willing or able to keep up such a frenetic career pace. By the time her next album is released in the spring of 2011, it will have been three years since her last.

But the slower pace of production—not life, just production—helps her fine-tune and mold her albums more than was needed, or necessary, when she was almost constantly either on tour or in the studio.

“In the past everything I wrote would end up on record,” Ms. DiFranco, who will perform at the Westhampton Performing Arts Center on Thursday, November 18, said this past weekend during an e-mail interview. “But these days, working slower, I end up with a healthy selection of outtakes—some songs that may appear on future albums, some that may never.

“I have a lot less time to write,” she continued. “I am forced to sit with my ideas and let them gestate longer.”

Thursday’s show at the Westhampton Beach PAC will feature a healthy selection of songs from both eras of Ms. DiFranco’s life—the frenetically busy and the more subdued last few years. Songs from her most recent album “Red Letter Year” and her thus-far unnamed next release will figure prominently in the concert, she said.

Even now, Ms. DiFranco stays on the road because it is where she does most of her work on her songs, shaping them for their album release.

“Audiences are great barometers for what works and what doesn’t,” she said. “When I get close to finishing a record, I ease up on generating new songs. The focus just naturally shifts from creating new material to fully realizing the material that’s already there.”

“Red Letter Year” was written and produced amid the very upheaval that produced the new incarnation of Ani DiFranco, the person—not to be confused with Ani DiFranco the musician who, to most fans, remains the politically-charged “musical activist” she always was: her songs rail against homophobia, racism, poverty and war.

The album’s title was a fitting moniker for a body of work produced while a one-time vagabond musician was transformed in a matter of months to a mother and wife—all while moving to a new city.

A native of Buffalo and a resident of the road for most of the last two decades, Ms. DiFranco moved to New Orleans, where her sound engineer husband, Mike Napolitano, grew up. The city, she says, has become a major flavor in her work, from the inclusion of a number of local musicians on the album to the production style of her husband, who engineered and co-produced the album, to one of the songs, which is about the city’s devastation and recovery from Hurricane Katrina.

With her husband at the helm of the sound mixing equipment, Ms. DiFranco says her latest albums are heads and tails above her previous work, which she largely mixed herself.

“It is definitely a step up in many ways due to my new collaborators,” she said. “In the past I may have slaughtered a perfectly good song on record because I’m not a great engineer or mixer and objectivity is just impossible when you’ve got no one to bounce off of but yourself.”

Her own skills and efforts clearly were ahead of the curve though. Few musicians who have achieved her level of success—a Grammy win in 2004 and three other nominations—with only themselves from which to bounce things off. That’s because the major-label corporate backing that typically catapults an artist to fame and success also provides a lot more than feedback, according to Ms. DiFranco, who has eschewed any corporate music industry involvement in her music.

“The profit motive that defines the major label music industry and the corporate world in general just never seemed like a respectable thing to me,” DiFranco said. “I believe it is more valuable to serve something bigger. To team up with a corporate apparatus to further the cause of my anti-corporate art seemed inappropriate.”

Ms. DiFranco’s show at the PAC comes in the middle of a 14-show mini-tour that runs through the month of November. Melissa Ferrick will be the opening act. The concert will be held on Thursday, November 18, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $45, $60 and $75. To purchase tickets, visit whbpac.org, call 288-1500, or stop by the box office on Main Street in Westhampton Beach.