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Date of Birth: September 23rd, 1970
Location of Birth: Buffalo, New York
First Professional Role: When she was 9 years old, she started playing in bars and coffee shops.
Astrological Sign: Libra (like me)
Influences: Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Suzanne Vega and Michelle Shocked.
Similar Artists: Tori Amos, Alana Davis, Beth Orton, Utah Phillips, Tracy Chapman, Sinead O' Conner, Liz Phair and Fiona Apple. |
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Our story begins in Buffalo, New York, a rust belt city perched precariously on the edge of the Great Lakes, known best for its terrible snow storms and lost superbowls. It is here that our heroine, Ani (pronounced AHH-nee) DiFranco was reared on a mid-eighties diet of oat bran and radio mayonnaise, and launched into the world somewhere in the interim between Woody Guthrie's "Pastures Of Plenty" and MTV's unplugged."
O.K. Just the facts. Ani is a punk folksinger who writes songs that can appeal to old folkies and simultaneously climb the college radio charts. She tours on the acoustic, college, and rock club circuits, shattering stereotypes and winning over unsuspecting fans everywhere. But of course, like all overnight success stories that were ten years in the making, the beginnings were much more humble.
Ani started playing Beatles' songs in local bars at age nine but didn't start writing her own material until age fifteen when she moved out of her mother's apartment. Living on her own, she played every Saturday night at the Essex Street Pub, and at sixteen she graduated from the Visual and Performing Arts High School. By the time she was eighteen she had played every bar in Buffalo a gazillion times and moved to New York City for a change of scenery. Now, ten years and sixteen albums later, she is still a steadfast independent.
To finance her first album, Ani looted her bank account and borrowed the rest from friends. She rejected offers from indie and major labels alike, and instead started her own record company, Righteous Babe Records, in an industry dominated by multinational corporations. Ani has since sold over one hundred thousand tapes and CD's on her own. She not only writes and publishes her own songs, but also produces her own recordings, creates the artwork, and releases them. She employs like-minded people in management and staff positions, supports local printers and manufacturers in her hometown, and utilizes a network of independent distributors in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. She tours extensively and damn near constantly on both sides of the Atlantic, repeatedly setting on-sight album sales records at music festivals and concert venues.
With a voice that can rock the boat one minute and the cradle the next, Ani DiFranco has a sound like no other. In performance she never ceases to stun and stagger her audience with her famous hundred-fifty watt smile and easy laughter juxtaposed against the brutal poetics of her lyrics and the reckless manhandling of her guitar. She has played to packed houses and rave reviews from Boston's Somerville Theater to San Francisco's Great American Music Hall, and from Toronto's Phoenix to a twelve-hundred-seat sell-out at Vancouver's Vogue Theatre. As a writer in Tampa exclaimed, "If folk music has a future it's Ani DiFranco."
A folkie in punk's clothing, Ani DiFranco battled successfully against the Goliath of corporate rock to emerge as one of the most influential and inspirational cult heroines of the 1990s. A resolute follower of D.I.Y. ethos, DiFranco released her records through her own indie label Righteous Babe, slowly but steadily building a devout grass-roots following on the strength of a relentless tour schedule; an ardent feminist and an open bisexual, her songs tackled issues like rape, abortion and sexism with insight and compassion, the music's empowering attitude and anger tempered by the poignant candor of singer-songwriter confessionalism. |
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