POX Ani DiFranco

One of the most depressing things for me was how little I liked Evolve after how much I loved Revelling/Reckoning.

I skipped Educated Guess after everyone said it was a fall-off from Evolve (!) but I really like Knuckle Down which is like a more sombre, knotty version of the serious parts of Little Plastic Castles.

Have never gotten around to any of the albums after that.

(obv their songwriting and performance styles are quite different in other ways)

they are, but the comparison's apt here - I think Ani sounds like she's working with the musicians a little more than JM, who I think of as pretty intensely controlling. Some of that's mythos I'm sure but one gets the sense from Don Juan & Hejira that she's enlisting these amazing players in pursuit of a very specific vision, whereas on R/R there's this sound of play that's just infectious and warm and intimate.

Tim you don't rate Reprieve? Its opener is such a beauty to me - it's both profoundly affecting and sports one of those wince-inducing lines that presents something-to-be-gotten-over for me; I think a lot of my favorite writers have these tendencies I have to come to terms with, that resistance draws me in closer eventually. (The line here is "the map led to an island in a sea of store-bought dreams/where soulless singers sang over beats made by machines." Oh no Ani! Not beats made by machines! Say not so!)

I haven't heard Reprieve! I should check out all of the more recent-ish albums.

That line is no worse than "People used to make 'records', as in the record of an event/the event of people making music in a room / now everything cross-marketing / it's about sunglasses and shoes / or guns and drugs, you choose" (from "Fuel" on Little Plastic Castles).

I'm resigned to the fact that ani was inevitably going to be a rhyming alex in nyc on these issues.

Another way to look at this is that Ani's number one for all time lyrical skill - the area in which she is basically unparalleled IMO - is in the metaphorical presentation of how she relates to the world around her.

I think despite her rep this is most clear in her relationship songs, a prime example being the lyrics to "Overlap" which I posted at the beginning of the thread - it's hard for me to think of lyrics I like more than "I build each one of my songs out of glass / so you can see me inside of them, I suppose / or you could just leave the image of me in the backround, I guess / and watch your own reflection superimposed."

But similarly her more political stuff also works this way, i.e. only to the extent that she sings it from the vantage of her actual inextricable entanglement in the world. Which is why a song like "The Million You Never Made" is so powerful while her overflowery put-downs of the major label pop music industry seem so cringey: the moment she ascends to a birds eye view she moves from simultaneously wise and implicated to condescending and un-self-aware.

A highly compressed list of favorites.

Another use of metaphor I love, from "The Million You Never Made":

"And I'm warning you I'm weightless / and the wind is always shifting / so don't try to hang anything on me / if you ever want to see it again"

This is a classic Ani inversion: literalise/visualise the central metaphorical phase ("don't hang that on me" is literalised as a washing line scenario) and then build on that visualisation to reflect back on the original metaphor - with wind blowing clothes off the line standing in for "you don't have a vantage point from which to judge or label me". It's kinda vibe-killing to break down the line to that extent, but I do think it's an excellent and very archetypal use of language.

I always come back to the extended metaphors and (when present) internal rhymes which also are the things no one seems to talk about when discussing her work.

On "This Bouquet" (with the key internal rhyming bits in italics):

got a garden of songs where I grow all my thoughts
wish I could harvest one or two for some small talk
seems like I'm starving for words whenever you're around
nothing on my tongue, so much in the ground
nothing on my tongue, so much in the ground

half the time I got my gaze trained on your motel door
fourth door from the end
rest [of the] time my gaze lays like a stain on the carpeted floor
if it weren't for my brain I'd just go over and make friends
too bad about my brain 'cause I'd like to make friends

see the little songbird unable to make a sound
you'd never know she follows her words from town to town
we both got gardens of songs so maybe it's okay
that I am speechless because I picked you this bouquet
yep, sure am speechless, but I picked you this bouquet

in addition to the pleasure of gaze / trained / lays / stain / brain, I find it so satisfying the way the notion of a "garden of song" gets spun out so unassumingly but so effectively into so many interlinking metaphors on what is a very short and otherwise simple song.