Ani DiFranco `Ups' the ante
by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., April 5, 1999) -- It was inevitable, one supposes, that a year after the mainstream media "discovered" Ani DiFranco -- several years after she had already established a substantial cult following on her own -- there would be a backlash.

Last year DiFranco was everybody's cover girl, lauded for her fierce, independent values, her dynamic concerts and her acute songwriting. Her winter 1998 album, "Little Plastic Castle," debuted on the Billboard album charts at number 22 -- unheard of for what was essentially, like all DiFranco's self-produced albums, a do-it-yourself effort -- and got rave reviews everywhere. Working her way up from clubs and small theaters, DiFranco began packing audiences into arenas and summer sheds.

Then, this past January, DiFranco released "Up Up Up Up Up Up" (Righteous Babe), the follow-up to "Little Plastic Castle," and it was greeted by mainstream critics with a resounding Bronx cheer.

That said more about the critics than it did about the album. "Up Up Up Up Up Up" is as good as anything DiFranco has done previously, a musically adventurous collection of new songs that both reins in some of her more expansive tendencies while digging deeper into her soul-groove tendencies. It is at once more intimate and melodic, full of spontaneous interaction among the members of her band, which now includes keyboardist Julie Wolf and bassist Jason Mercer in addition to her longtime drummer, Andy Stochansky.

DiFranco brings her new band and songs to the Mullins Center at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst on April 9 at 8. Tickets are $22 and available at Ticketmaster locations or by phone at (413) 733-2500.

DiFranco will also perform solo at this summer's Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in Hillsdale, N.Y., on July 24.

DiFranco's new album is a quieter, warmer affair than some of her more recent efforts. The songs are more open-ended and jazzy, and the album has more of a band feel to it than previous efforts, with musicians contributing equally to the texture and course of each number.

This is most obvious on "Angel Food," which features some weird noises that turn out to have been from an electronic toy that drummer Stochansky picked up during the recording session, and which eventually determines the harmonic destination of the tune.

But it is also apparent in various other ways, in how Wolf's keyboards lend an organ-jazz feel to several numbers, including "Know Now Then," or how the simple addition of the banjo to "Angry Anymore" lends the song a timeless quality.

DiFranco continues to be a songwriter who seamlessly balances the personal and political. Few are as trenchant on issues of class and race as DiFranco, and songs like "'Tis of Thee" and "Trickle Down" land her solidly in the folk-protest tradition of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. Then she turns around and is just as trenchant about herself, with all due modesty explaining in the cabaret-style title track that "she's trying to sing just enough/so that the air around her moves/and make music like mercy/that gives what it is/and has nothing to prove."

The album closes with "Hat Shaped Hat," a funky, 13-minute, experimental, surrealist story-song, that shows another influence of Bob Dylan on DiFranco's work, and which might even be a disguised fable about DiFranco's encounter with Dylan when the two toured together in the fall of 1997.

That so many mainstream critics have found the need to chop DiFranco down to size after building her up, and doing so on the basis of what is yet another soulful, visionary work from the artist of the decade, is truly a sad commentary on our culture, and one that says a lot more about the cultural transaction than the object of the commentary. Here's betting DiFranco has the last laugh.

A weekend of blues at North Adams State College kicks off tonight at 8 with K.J. James followed tomorrow night at 9 with Les Sampou. Both shows are in the campus center and are free.... Folk-rockers The Nields are at the Eighth Step in Albany on April 16....Singer-songwriter Dar Williams will bring her benefit tour for environmental causes to the Troy (N.Y.) Savings Bank Music Hall on April 22....Ben Folds Five is at Williams College on April 30....Bob Dylan and Paul Simon bring their doubleheader summer-shed tour to Great Woods in Mansfield for two nights on July 22 and 23 and to the Hartford area on July 24. With July 26 an open date on the Dylan/Simon tour schedule, and with nothing planned for Tanglewood that night, could a Tanglewood date be a Dylan/Simon possibility?

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[This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on April 9, 1999. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1999. All rights reserved.]