Ani Difranco – Educated Guess

Ani DiFranco has long been one of America’s premier independent artists, having released sixteen full-length albums since 1990 and generally going her own way in nearly all respects. On Educated Guess, she takes that independence a step further by dispensing with the funky accompaniment of her recent efforts, opting instead for a solo approach.

DiFranco pares the instrumentation down to just acoustic guitar and vocals, plus an imaginative sense of how those tools should be arranged. Unlike, say, Todd Rundgren’s Something/Anything?, this album doesn’t seek to dazzle with do-it-yourself virtuosity, but neither does it adhere to the lo-fi insularity of demo-style recordings such as Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. Rather, the album splits the difference between those methods, boasting a warm, organic sound that balances perfectly its stripped-down motif.

Of course, none of the above would matter much if the material on the album didn’t measure up, and in this respect Educated Guess often does dazzle. Buoyed by syncopated guitar figures that zigzag between funk, folk and jazz, DiFranco offers up Whitman-esque celebrations of self (“I am an all powerful amazon woman,” she sings at one point), stark snapshots of vulnerability (“Bodily”), and the occasional Beat-like spoken-word poem (“Akimbo”). She also strikes the usual blows for feminism, the environment, and civil disobedience, but manages to stay just this side of proselytizing.

Educated Guess isn’t perfect. Titling a song “Origami” is bad enough, but lines such as “men are delicate origami creatures who need women to unfold them” come off as sophomoric. Such slips are rare, however, and in the end say as much about artistic courage as they do about any tendency toward pretension. DiFranco seems to embrace the old bromide about not allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good — and that’s something to admire.