Discovering Ani DiFranco

Songs with balanced harmony between quality music and quality lyrics? Not many these days. I mean songs that tell about one's world veiw, personal processes and life struggles. Simple and understandable, touching. Today Layla introduced me to Ani DiFranco and I just love her art from simply listening to the samples of her songs on her web site. I find it quite unique and simple, easy to listen and connect to. He art is way out fo standard, just being herself. I love how she can laugh at the end of a song, or simply recite the lyrics to music.

from the web site: "Ani DiFranco's career has been full of surprises — for her, and for the rest of us — and she's no stranger to change, both sudden and slow. But some things remain unchanged, like her commitment to speaking the truth, as she sees it, without fear or concession. Bruce Cockburn recently observed in Performing Songwriter that Ani considers it part of her job description "to try and reflect real life in [her] songs. The life of the streets; the life of nations; the lives of people coping with power or its absence, looking for joy through the loneliness and pain and the complexities of relationship; the life of the spirit. All these are the stuff of human experience, and human experience is what we all share.""

Here are some of my favourite parts so far:

ask any eco-system harm here is harm there
and there and there
and aggression begets aggression
it's a very simple lesson
that long preceded any king of heaven
and there's this brutal imperial power
that my passport says i represent
but it will never represent where my heart lives
only vaguely where it went

cuz i know when you grow up surrounded
by willful ignorance
you learn that mercy has its own country
and that it's round and borderless
and then you just grow wings
and rise above it all
like there where that hawk is circling
above that strip mall

and this one:

long time love has got to breathe, babe
you got to let it ebb and flow
if you want a ball to bounce
you gotta let it go
just let it go

i know men are delicate
origami creatures
who need women to unfold them
hold them when they cry

and this one:

yes, i've bin so many places
flown through vast empty spaces
with stewardesses whose hands
look much older than their faces
i've tossed so many napkins
into that big hole in the sky
bin at the bottom of the atlantic
seething in a two-ply
looking up through all that water
and the fishes swimming by
and i don't always feel lucky
but i'm smart enough to try
cuz humility has buoyancy
and above us only sky

and this:

i swear some stuff you just see better from further away
and i think i communicate best now, the less i say
and i can't dance if the band can't play
and the vibe is going nowhere tonight

Her arrangements are quite surprising to me and here what i read on the web: she "inspired countless other musicians to rewrite the rules of the recording industry by striving for self-sufficiency and refusing to allow art to be subsumed by cold commerce."

http://www.righteousbabe.com/ani/index.asp