Ani DiFranco bringing mix of new and vintage tunes to Englert concert

Grammy winner, singer/songwriter, author, activist, wife, mother of two, feminist icon, folk music icon with eclectic influences from punk to soul. So many names, so many hats.

But is her name Ani Di Franco or DiFranco?

It’s both, sort of.

Her family spells it Di Franco, but that was wreaking havoc with her airport check-ins, so for her public persona, it’s DiFranco.

“Well, it is really a ‘space’ for me, too, and I wrote my name with the space in it until I was a touring musician and the airlines started automating,” she said by phone from her home in New Orleans.

“Now you go to an airport and you go to a kiosk, you don't go to a human, and the space in the last name screwed up all the computers all the time. So my life of travel made me consolidate it. I guess that's like the typical way of the immigrant, right? Things for convenience,” said the daughter of a Canadian mother and a first-generation Italian American father who met at MIT. Mom was an architect, Dad was a research engineer.

Even DiFranco’s given name is different — Angela Maria, after her Italian grandmother — but no one’s ever called her that.

“Right from the beginning they dubbed me ‘Ani,’ so that's like a name I don't even associate with myself,” she said with a laugh. And it’s pronounced “AH-nee,” not “Annie.”

But nothing’s confusing about her superstardom as a musician and writer who has charted the course of her own career. She regularly sells out concert venues, and is returning to the Englert Theatre in downtown Iowa City on Sunday night, Sept. 10, 2023.

She said she’ll probably be “jumping around” her vast catalog in concert, and is bringing “a few people” to play with her, including drummer, pedal steel guitarist and another guitarist.

“I’m just really excited to come play music with people again,” she said. “It's been a long time.”

It’s also the last time audiences will hear her onstage for a while, as she pivots this month to a different kind of live performance — a yet-to-be-announced play.

“This is gonna be my only musical adventure for a long time, so I’m really psyched to go out and play songs from ‘Revolutionary Love,’ songs from ‘Little Plastic Castle’ that just had its 25-year anniversary (and) new songs. I've actually been also relearning some surprise, ancient songs from the grab bag.”

Corridor connections

No stranger to Eastern Iowa, she’s played Cedar Rapids and Iowa City several times, beginning with CSPS Hall in 1992. In a Facebook post asking what people would like to know about her, Mel Andringa swiftly replied. (History: He and F. John Herbert turned the 1891 CSPS Hall in southeast Cedar Rapids into a cutting-edge performing arts hub 100 years later, and spent 28 years at the helm.)

Andringa wrote: “I picked her up at the CR airport in a red F150. It was March of 1992, and there was still snow on the ground. Forty people came to the show and she slept in one of the offices at CSPS that night.

“The next time she came to CSPS, we packed 200 into the auditorium. The next time she came to Eastern Iowa, we presented her with Dar Williams on a double bill at Clapp Recital Hall at the UI School of Music. Then, we did a show with her at the Paramount. She would go on to play Carver Arena but she always remembered to ‘Dance with the one who brought you.’

“Ani was the first artist we encountered who took total control of her business, published her own recordings, etc. Her attitude was a model for many other artists, especially young women who would seek out the venues she pioneered. Ani put CSPS on a map that many others would follow.”

When she found out Andringa would be celebrating his 80th birthday on Aug. 18, just two a days after this Gazette interview, DiFranco replied: “I love CSPS. Boy, as you know, they supported me before most. So please give him my love and thanks.”

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Righteous Babe Records

Always a trailblazer, DiFranco started her own label, Righteous Babe Records, in 1990 in her hometown of Buffalo, N.Y. While still considered “small,” the company has grown, and the label’s current artists include Iowa City’s Pieta Brown.

Andringa posed this question for DiFranco: “Ask her how she knew being engaged with every element of her career would pay off, when so many were letting labels and agents take the weight off.”

Her reply: “As you were asking that I was thinking, you know, I bet I would have signed with a label and hoped for the best, like many young people do, right? It's like we all need help, and some label comes along and says, ‘I can help you. I can get your music to ears and help you do your art as a job.’

“I probably would have gone the traditional route and hoped for the best (and) imagined myself as the exception to the rule, like we all do: ‘This is not going to drag me down or commodify me or constrict me or rule me. I'm going to use this to my advantage.’

“But I had the double whammy of being really a political idealist, and I was really anti-corporate and I had a real punk attitude about big businesses and how they impact art and culture. So because of the chip on my shoulder, it became about more than just me. It became like a political mission to not go with the corporations and the commercial route.”

Finding her voice

A prolific songwriter and recording artist with 22 albums — including 2021’s luminous “Revolutionary Love” — it feels like DiFranco always has written with a socially conscious voice.

What gives her the courage to express her convictions through words and music when it's not always the popular opinion?

“Other people meeting my eyes and saying, ‘Thank you — I wouldn't be here if it weren't for you.’ That's what dwarfs everything else,” she said.

Now 52, her sense of the world around her emerged at an early age, as she watched her parents’ marriage crumble, which she said “deeply impacted” her older brother, which she chronicled in her 2019 memoir, “No Walls and the Recurring Dream.”

The turmoil left her on the outside looking in.

“Everything was focused on him, because there was this acute manifestation of all the problems happening, and I was just sort of on my own watching,” she told The Gazette.

“I think I became very aware early on that there were choices in this world, and there were different ways of being,” she said. “And I looked at all the deep struggle in trauma and my family, and my instinct was, ‘Get me out of here. I want to go find a place to be happy.’ So maybe I got jump on — like when you were asking your question, I was thinking, ‘Yeah, I don't know if it was ever about me.’ I don't think I had much of that grace period in my family.”

Her parents separated when she was 11, and by that time, she already had been playing guitar in local bars for two years, often with her guitar teacher. She moved from playing Beatles covers to writing songs by age 14, and the next year, not wanting to move with her mother to Connecticut, became an emancipated minor at age 15. At 19, she would start her own record label.

To find her audience — or for them to find her — she was “going out there to every bar and coffeehouse in Buffalo, and then wherever any form of transportation would take me, whoever would have me, and just playing over and over and over for people.

“The stage — even before it was a stage — when there was no platform at all, when I was just standing in the corner of some room, that was my school. I don't think I was inherently gifted as a performer. It was really a long, slow process of learning.”

Same with her songwriting, which naturally has evolved since her early teen years.

“Well, you can imagine my songs are dramatic at 50, so it was high drama — the full angst. I was already as a teenager writing topical songs. I had this friend who was in his 30s, and he was a folk singer and an activist in his way, and a reader and a thinker.

“And so I think I was working with the template of the folk singer and the troubadour from when I was very young, and trying to be a citizen in my art. The whole tradition of folk music tried to make society better while making art.”

She hopes she’s become “a little more humble” through the years.

“It’s funny,” she said. “If you write hundreds of songs, and in those hundreds of songs, you're pointing your finger all over the place at people and the things that they do, and the things that ‘happen to you,’ quote, unquote, eventually you have this huge pile of songs, and you can look at them and go, ‘OK, wow, what's the common denominator here?

“It’s human to find outside of ourselves, what we're struggling with inside of ourselves, and call it out. I don't know — do I do less calling out now? I think something in the tone has shifted in the way that I call out now. Maybe.”

Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com