Ani Difranco Tickets

About Ani Difranco

Ani DiFranco (born September 23, 1970) is a progressive singer, guitarist, and songwriter. Born in Buffalo, New York, Ani started playing gigs at the age of nine and built her career from there. In 1989, at the age of eighteen, Ani started her own record company, Righteous Babe Records, with just $50, and recorded Ani DiFranco, issued in the winter of 1990. Later on she relocated to New York City and toured vigorously.

She is openly bisexual and, in 1998, married sound engineer Andrew Gilchrist. They separated five years later but remain friends. Some of DiFranco's more recent songs speak of the idea of having to choose between one life and another. In general, much of DiFranco's material is autobiographical, keeping with the "personal lyric" tradition of the singer-songwriter. Much of her material is also strongly political, concerned with contemporary social issues such as racism, sexism and sexual abuse, homophobia, reproductive rights, poverty, and war. The combination of these two characteristics is partially responsible for the early popularity DiFranco enjoyed among politically active college students, some of whom set up fan pages on the web to document her career as early as 1994. Because of DiFranco's rapid rise in popularity in the mid-1990s -- a rise that, mostly unaccompanied by mainstream press, was fueled by personal contact and word of mouth -- fans often expressed a feeling of community with each other. As DiFranco has become more known, the extent to which fans may identify with such a community has lessened.

Perhaps because of her popularity in progressive circles, DiFranco has also endorsed explicit political positions outside of her music. During the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, she endorsed the idea of voting for Ralph Nader in non-"battleground" states. She also supported democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich in the 2004 Primaries.

She is notable also for the success of her record label, Righteous Babe Records (RBR). Ownership of RBR allows DiFranco a great deal of artistic freedom, including the ability to release as much, and as often, as she has, and to include controversial material and language. References to her independence from major labels appear occasionally in her songs, most notably in "The Million You Never Made," which discusses the act of turning down a lucrative contract, "Napoleon," on the album Dilate, which sympathizes sarcastically with an unnamed friend (believed by some to be Suzanne Vega) who did sign with a label, and "The Next Big Thing", a song from the early Not So Soft album which describes an imagined meeting with a label headhunter who evaluates the singer based on her looks. DiFranco has occasionally joined with Prince in discussing publicly the problems associated with major record companies. While DiFranco is proud of her label, which employs a number of people in her hometown of Buffalo, in a 1997 open letter to Ms. magazine she expressed displeasure at what she sees as a way to ensure her own artistic freedom was seen solely in terms of its financial success. A new album, Knuckle Down, was released on January 25, 2005.

DiFranco's former drummer, Andy Stochansky, has pursued a solo career as a singer-songwriter since leaving DiFranco's band.