‘The goal of a protest song is to make people feel strong and alive': Ani DiFranco on Broadway, Fugazi and 30 years of activism

The Guardian

17-04-2025

Please talk about growing up in Buffalo, New York – the music scene there, and becoming an emancipated adult at 15. AugustoMAs a child, I befriended Michael Meldrum, a local troubadour. He brought me around to his gigs and coffee houses. That was a cool, unique way to grow up, beside this alcoholic artist who hopped from girlfriend to girlfriend's house. He he was smart and so well informed when it came to music.
I was his shadow between the ages of nine and 13 or 14 or so. Beyond that, we parted ways. So when I was an emancipated minor at 15 and going into the adult world, it was with no protector by my side. I was out there in bars, on my own, running the open mic, playing gigs. I had an after-school job – I was trying to finish high school. I never managed to grow a thick skin; I'm still very open and porous. Somehow I survived all those years without cutting myself off.
I remember seeing you regularly in London on a Monday night at the Weavers Arms, probably in the early 90s. What brought you to London at that time? KjwillyBack in the day you could get a cheap plane ticket, where you were only supposed to stay for a week and you couldn't bring any luggage. So I went to London, and – shhh, don't tell anybody! – I stayed longer than a week. I started showing up to open mics and making friends. I remember a gig at the Mean Fiddler: a split bill between me and Tori Amos. The audience was loud and rude, and Tori was scolding them, and then I played. That was before either of us were either of us.
In America, there was this stereotype of me that the media proliferated again and again: angry, hairy feminist. So that meant only certain people even felt invited to my shows, because the media told them exactly what my music was and who it was for. But when I got to England, there was nobody saying anything about me, so people could find their own way to my songs. The further I got from my stereotype, the more open and free my connection [to the audience] became.
Doing things like rejecting the major-label system and having a social conscience – and, importantly, acting on it – inspires admiration. Is it me, or is that way of being, and of doing things, dying a death? eamonmccHaving thwarted the music industry and remained independent, I grew a lot. But when I look back, I see a lot of ways in which having a team of creative people around me would have really helped me make decisions. And helped me look good: there's no hair products in my bathroom, you know.
These records that I made all on my own are an acquired taste. I'm not an expert recordist, mixer, producer. I have regrets about not doing a lot of my songs justice along the way. It's just a matter of what I can afford, operating on the level that I am. There are sacrifices to being outspoken and political. I've been pushed down and reduced because of my feminism, etc. But anything worthwhile involves sacrifice.
What is the difference between a good song and a great song? InASenseInnocenceA great song is a song that was not meant to be great: it was just meant to be a song. So many people want to make a hit, but to me, that's like pulling yourself out of the water of creation and into calculation. Even worrying about that is a distraction from making real art. I'm just doing what I'm compelled to do in the moment.
At a time when women's rights are being eroded at a terrifying pace, what can we do to rise to the challenge and support the young women of today? SJB3288What we can do looks different for each of us. For me, it has looked like writing a lot of songs, and lending my time and energy to movements. For somebody else, it might be bringing a casserole to a neighbour. My whole life I've fantasised about the moment when women across colour, economic and cultural divides reach for each other and model the solution together. I believe it would be the most powerful thing the world has ever seen. Individualism is a mirage.
Somebody asked me, 'Do you still see yourself as a protest singer?' And I'm not sure if I ever did, because I don't think that telling somebody they're wrong about something is very effective. More and more, I see my role through my songs as saying to people to my right and to my left: you are here and you matter. Really, the goal of what might on the surface sound like a 'protest song' is to uplift the people of the world who are trying to do good work; it's to make them feel stronger and more alive.
I hope that more artists on every level will be putting their butts on the line and getting political, because it couldn't be more urgent. It's a terrifying time for democracy, for women's rights, for the environment, everything. We are in peril on so many levels, so I hope that even artists with a lot to lose will go there. Who would I team up with for an anthem about women's rights? What's Little Simz doing – let's go!
You have completed your 23rd album and have been around a while. How do you maintain your creativity when Gertrude Stein, for example, declared that after 26 an artist is through? WoodsDThere's something to that: for a lot of us, what we have to offer, we offer right away. The work that I did [between ages] 18 to 23, that is probably the work that affected my culture the most. But I've made a lot of songs since then. I accept the fact that I'm not the 'it girl' any more and that's fine. But I am still growing, and passionate about what I do. There is no diminishment of value to women as they age, unless you're working for the approval of the patriarchy. Our energy is being drained and taken from us by these forces that tell us we're not good enough. I find it so sad that people in Hollywood are all trying to play the game with plastic surgery and injections. People accepting who they are, even as they age, is a service to everyone.
What is your most reliable source of creative inspiration? How do you preserve the playfulness and magic in music-making in an industry, and indeed a world, with lots of noise and criticism? April006One of my most reliable sources is other people's art. My favourite thing is to go to a show that makes me want to go home and pick up my guitar and write a song. And my second favourite thing is to be that for somebody else.
Has being part of the theatre scene, through Persephone [the role she played in the musical Hadestown on Broadway], influenced your art or creative lens? April006It was very humbling in so many ways. I don't know how much more humbling I can take in this life, but to play to an audience that did not show up to see me with love in their heart, on a nightly basis, was eye-opening. I had to lock eyes and sing right to people, and 97% of the time they were giving me the death stare. It was brutal.
Woody Guthrie wrote 'this machine kills fascists' on his guitar as a symbol of the power of words and music to fight against oppression. We have a new generation of fascists and a nationalism that is rising worldwide with renewed vigour. You once wrote about 'coming of age during the plague of Reagan and Bush'; Trump feels like a whole other thing again. How do you think about the role of your music against this new backdrop? benwerdComing of age during the plague of Reagan and Bush, I thought that we could stoop no lower. I was naive – there's always a lower. As a political songwriter, you would love for your tunes to become passé. I wrote a song in 1997 about the plague of gun violence in America. [There were] these songs that I wrote in the George W Bush era, thinking that there was no greater evil to fight … and now here we are under a Trump regime. It's horrifying to have these 30-year-old songs be more relevant than ever. Being an activist all these years is exhausting. And that's also a very deliberate strategy by these repressive forces: to exhaust us. For me, who's been taking to the streets for 30-plus years, I have to battle this feeling of: does it even matter, if all of the honour is stripped from politics, and the political leaders are just power-hungry oligarchs who don't care?
As a young, straight guy in the late 90s with a big love of Fugazi and straight-edge punk, I still found my way in to your music and found both it and your story revelatory and inspiring. I wonder, did you ever have or feel any kinship with those hardcore and very male bands at the time or since? HMKGrey2Absolutely. I love Fugazi and they love me back. I grew up in an era where if you were a woman speaking about your experience, that was, according to many people and the media, only relevant to other women. Any man who was open and brave enough to relate to and hear a woman's experience, they were renegade and rare beasts. I remember having conversations on dressing-room walls, where we wrote to each other – they played the club a week before me, or I did. In the 90s, before social media, if you wanted to send somebody a message, the wall was where you posted.
I loved hearing how you began by playing gigs at bars, and the way your songs were sometimes influenced by trying to grab the audience's attention. Could you speak a bit more on how you struck out to develop your unique guitar style? April006The dynamics of my music – I use a lot of loud and soft – all come, I think, from the survival skills I learned playing in bars alone, to shut people the hell up! I discovered that if you make a loud sound or hold a note, and then you leave a chasm of silence, people's talking will suddenly hang in the air and they will notice themselves, and then they might even notice you. In that moment, there is a seed of possibility for capturing their attention.
What would you say to your Gen Z fans? The young lesbians still love you! paige004I still love them back. We're still here. Being an old guard now of feminism and the queer movement, us old lesbos or lesbo-adjacent people have things to offer. And I hope that the younger generation want to have us at the table. They are finding their own way, and they very much should, and I have a lot to learn from it. But there are some feminist principles that could help all of our social movements, a lot of wisdom there to be drawn from.
'He said, are you an American citizen? I said 'Yes sir, so far'' – any more or less since you wrote those lyrics? brittunculusMy mother is Canadian, so as of a year or two ago, I did achieve Canadian citizenship, so I'm dual now. When it really is time for me to sit down and leave it to another generation, maybe you'll find me in the woods of Quebec.
Ani DiFranco's European tour begins 11 June at Royal Albert Hall, London