Ani DiFranco
Red Letter Year finds Ani DiFranco subverting a whole new batch of stereotypes. For nearly twenty years now, DiFranco has been pleasantly bushwhacking listeners with the notion that tart declarations of independence from a hardscrabble, punkish, female singer-songwriter are best regarded not as protest music, but as infectiously joyful revelry. Forget about Cyndi Lauper, Joan Jett or Amy Winehouse: Precious few performers are able to wring as much fun and satisfaction out of a song as DiFranco does on, say, “Not A Pretty Girl”. In that sense, the double entendre in the name of her self-owned record label Righteous Babe has been her talisman, the medium and message of her career.
The pleasant bushwhack of Red Letter Year (which could be subtitled Righteous Family) is the way DiFranco counterintuitively utilizes her contentment as a creative launching pad. The disc was two years in the making, a period during which DiFranco verified her soulmate and embarked upon motherhood. As with her best early material, she’s creating music with a fearless sense of adventure, as if she has nothing to lose. In those early days, that was because nearly everything of value that she possessed was between her ears. Now her intrepid spirit is borne by a confidence that her emotional foundation is impregnable.
Love permeates the grooves and textures of these songs: Red Letter Year producer Mike Napolitano is also the soulmate and new father in the household, and he surrounds his partner with the most sumptuous, subtle and multifaceted arrangements of her career. There’s a recurring string section and a guest appearance by the Rebirth Brass Band. The alternative jazzbo Todd Sickafoose plays a variety of basses and keyboards, and the percussionists can be light and wrinkly or harsh and industrial. It’s probably no coincidence that the most overt paeans to daughter Petah (“Present/Infant”, “Landing Gear”) are rich in beauty and filigreed detail, and that the love notes to Napolitano (“Smiling Underneath”, “Way Tight”) are more spare and direct.
Those who fear that DiFranco has gone soft will find solace in the political pugnacity of “The Atom” or “Alla This”. But don’t get hung up on past patterns or artificial benchmarks. DiFranco turned 38 a few days after this disc was released in late September, and had spent her time before then moving to a new city (from Buffalo to New Orleans), forming a new touring band, and conjuring new material from her experience as mate and mother. She still occasionally bangs out guitar chords like a busker, and delivers lines like “I won’t pray to a male god.” But give me the beguiling funk of “Emancipated Minor” (reminiscent of Byrne/Eno-era Talking Heads), or the ukulele and pedal steel mix of “Landing Gear.” And instead of preaching to the converted against male gods, give me braver, more barbed lines like “And I can’t support the troops/’cause every last one of them is being duped” (from “Alla This”).
Ani DiFranco records “Alla This” in the studio.
Red Letter Day is a grown-up record by a middle-aged artist unafraid to snarl like a juvenile delinquent one minute and to coo lines like “And I’ll learn to fix stuff/if you will teach me love” the next. I don’t think domestic bliss has been this creatively transformative since John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy.