Ani DiFranco’s just-released Red Letter Year is the work of a mature artist with broad musical vision. Thanks to her fierce independence, DiFranco’s had the luxury of evolving – growing to form and realize that vision - in public and at her own pace.
That’s rare in today’s music business, where major labels and even many independents pressure new signings for hits, mapping a path that often leads to artistic compromise and a break in the trust between artists and their fans.
Every one of DiFranco’s 18 studio albums has been on her own Righteous Babe label, and ever since her 1990 debut she’s had an audience that’s warmly supported her. Initially she was embraced by the women’s movement, but the quality of her music and her endless touring expanded her following to a broader college and alternative-rock listenership. And that audience has become more sophisticated along with DiFranco.
DiFranco’s also earned a reputation among guitarists for a powerful and unorthodox playing style that’s uncommonly aggressive for an acoustic player. At times her strumming is angular and halting, giving the six-string rhythm that’s the foundation for her songs a lurching, staccato attack. And then there’s her sound, which uses a variety of open and alternate tunings to create a harmonically rich bedrock with hints of atonality – something she shares with alternative rock cornerstones Sonic Youth.
For example, DiFranco’s popular tunes “Knuckle Down” and “Modulation” use a near-cousin of Open E, while open D seems to be part of her tuning foundation. “Seeing Eye Dog” and “Lag Time,” are just one note different than Open D. They are played in D-A-D-F#-G-D. Reportedly she employs at least a dozen more, which makes her marathon live shows a guitar tech’s nightmare.
Compared to DiFranco’s early recordings – all strum and drang (get it?) – Red Letter Year seems like the work of an entirely different performer. But more recent discs like 2003’s revealingly titled Evolve and 2004’s Educated Guess hew closer. Early on her vocal delivery matched the machine-gun stutter of her strumming. Over the past few years she has grown capable of elegant, extended phrasing and smooth melodies that make even the turbulent ideas expressed in numbers like Red Letter Year’s title track, which mourns the devastation of both New Orleans and the American Dream, go down like honeyed tea.
The Crescent City has also crept deeply into her soul, as it will for almost any musician who lives there. DiFranco moved to New Orleans shortly before Katrina. Her love for the city and its warm, relaxed lifestyle – a near opposite of the chilly northern existence in her native Buffalo – especially infuses the album’s playful celebrations of love. And while experimentation has led her to build arrangements for Red Letter Year on loops and samples and the ambient horn of guest musician and Eno collaborator John Hassell, the Rebirth Brass Band plays a gracefully funky “Red Letter Year Reprise” and street parade beats rear up on various numbers. Fellow Louisianans Richard Comeaux and C.C. Adcock contribute, too, playing pedal steel and electric guitar, respectively.
There’s also a surprising sense of innocence that pervades Red Letter Year. It’s explicit in the playful and love-struck lyrics of songs like “Way Tight.” And it gives even the potentially bitterest lines like “I won’t pray to a male god/’cause that would be insane” in the dark freedom song “Emancipated Minor” an undercurrent of undeniable hope. That’s an emotional balance a run-of-the-mill singer-songwriter could never accomplish.