Singer/songwriter Ani DiFranco has been doing it on her own since she started making recordings at 18. Her Righteous Babe Records, still based in Buffalo, NY, has released 16 of Ani’s own albums and about a dozen others by hand-picked artists, including Arto Lindsay, Drums & Tuba, Bitch And Animal and Hammell On Trial. DiFranco has swapped album appearances with Prince and Maceo Parker, produced recordings by Dan Bern and Janis Ian, performed orchestral versions of her compositions with the Buffalo Philharmonic, helped find wholly new fans for the songs of Woody Guthrie and the stories of Utah Phillips, had her own tunes covered by the likes of Dave Matthews and Chuck D, and has inspired countless others. She is a relentless touring musician and performer of great power and conviction—and she’s probably playing a swing state near you right now.

Your new tour is running through the swing states and you titled the tour “Vote Dammit!” Why this urgency now?
Besides the obvious? Desperation for a regime change here! There seem to be a lot of people out there right now who are talking about voting and feeling inspired, finally, to do so, which is really encouraging. I’ve always felt that voting was step one for citizenry. Democracy just doesn’t exist without our participation. I think we’ve tried not voting and this is where it has gotten us to, so exploring the alternatives… very apropos. So, like so many people, we were just wondering how we could get involved at this crucial juncture.

Have you voted every election since you were 18?
No, I can’t say that I have. I’ve certainly tried. I’m little Miss Absentee Ballot, so that’s always very complicated. I think the whole voting system is much more complicated than it need be. Simple things, like when you’re 18 you should just automatically be registered to vote; you shouldn’t have to go through this rigmarole. It seems like we could have better systems to help people vote. But, I’m no saint; I’ve certainly missed an election or two.

Your friend Dennis Kucinich had said that he would continue his campaign up to the Democratic National Convention, but how did you feel about way the mainstream media dismissed him quite some time ago?
It’s typical of the corporate media these days, which not only controls information, but controls minds and decides elections. Dennis is out of the race now. He has officially passed on his support to Kerry. His intention was to run up to the convention to get as many delegates at the Democratic Convention with the idea that even though the media has deemed Kerry the candidate long ago the direction of the Democratic Party was still up in the air; especially with Kerry going, “Um… er… Um… Just elect me.” So, very vehemently and thoughtfully, Dennis has been trying to steer the Democratic Party away from the centrist conservative direction it has been going in, thanks to Gore and Clinton and this rightward pendulum swing of our whole society. Of course, it goes back to Reagan and Bush and that whole legacy of Cultural Revolution. And I think that he’s been quite effective, if you look at the Democratic Convention on TV, there’s a whole lotta Kucinich signs out there and they really are trying to distinguish themselves from Republicans. Kerry and his people may be realizing that there is a progressive force out there in America and they need to be heeded; they need to be listened to if he wants to get elected.

Do you think that Kerry may have intents and ideas that he and his people might be slow to put out to air because of the way the mainstream media deals with new information?
One can hope that there’s a liberal coil in him waiting to spring and he will act sanely and try to enact some justice when he’s in office because I firmly believe that we must get out there and we must elect him. It’s just gotta happen. I can’t even contemplate the alternative. In fact, we’re passing around all of these ideas and I think we need a new popular drink for this summer called The Landslide. We need to come up with the tastiest mix drinks so we can walk into any bar and loudly proclaim, “Landslides, anyone?”

But then you’d have to have a built-in hangover cure, so everyone would get up and vote.
The repealing of the Patriot Act and the stopping of nuclear waste dumping in Nevada, these will cure our hangovers. Basically, I try not to get too hung up on who is Kerry and what is he capable of doing for us because the fact is we don’t elect a king and he is yet but one man and I think just the mere fact of a Democrat in office means a whole regime change, as the bumper stickers say. Then we have a whole host of new people in office, we have judicial appointments that begin to lean toward the humanitarian rather than the fascist. We have opportunities for all of us to do our grassroots work when we are not all in crisis mode. Whether or not John Kerry is the savior of our country, I think we are. And just having the opportunity under a kinder, gentler administration for us to do the good work of political change is all that I hope for.

Best case scenario, come January, Kerry is in office what’s the next goal?
The goals spring eternal. I don’t how to say it so it doesn’t sound trite and general, but the fight for peace and justice just continues. It’s got nothing to do with the beauty contest in November other than that the level of opportunity we will have to enact decency in this country… I think the fight has many facets. I don’t even see politics in terms of issues because they’re all so connected.

What would you say to young potential voters who may be disenfranchised but maybe have also done their research and found out about the voter roll purge in Florida in the 2000 election and feel that a vote is powerless?
I would say, get up, leave your house and speak to it. That 2000 coup presented such an opportunity for systematic change. There it was in all our faces, the winner-take-all state by state bullshit, the electoral college, the fuzzy ballots and the taking of former prisoners off of registration rolls and all of this shady, shifty, corrupt and undemocratic systems that need to be revamped. And then, of course, we had a supposed president who had no interest in heeding the call and learning the lessons and making systematic change and then there was 9/11, which became the endless excuse and distraction from everything else that is real and pressing, but it’s not too late. I’m so struck by the immense power that we have as citizens that we don’t exercise. I think that we are taught to feel helpless. The boob tube has been telling us that we are consumers for decades and that this is our route to happiness. And it’s been intentionally making us forget that we are citizens and that actually community involvement, that leading an active and engaged life, is the route to happiness; not buying stuff. Just simply leaving your house and going and finding people who are doing good work in your own community and helping them is an incredible jolt toward liberation and empowerment. There is so much that we can do. People like Dennis Kucinich who are out there stompin’ around talking about electoral reform, let’s support him. Let’s ignore the media that condescends to him and excludes him and tell each other that yes, he is a viable candidate and yes, he is an honorable, impressive leader and stand behind him. Stand with people who are doing the work and help them; there are so many opportunities.

It does seem easier for people fall into line and hit the complacency train…
Yeah, there’s such passivity and self-censorship and inaction and complacency in this country. I just went on a trip to Burma, which was life changing and mind altering. Burma happens to be the longest running dictatorship on the planet right now. It’s incredibly repressive and violent. There’s basically a campaign of ethnic cleansing happening there; it’s just brutal and startling. And in contrast with such darkness there is just incredible light; there are people who are so strong and convicted and have dedicated their lives to the fight for democracy; who hold democracy higher than anything, which is so inspiring and refreshing, especially coming from this ultra-privileged apathetic society where we don’t even bother to exercise our power to vote and we have the opportunity. And here are these people who are fighting for their lives and I met people who were political prisoners for 13 years who told stories of torture and who still refuse to give up the fight even under pain of death. So, I mean… what do I mean? I don’t know. It’s certainly a contrast in societies.

Those people fight for things that most Americans happily hand away.
Exactly. And the censorship there is insane. You can’t say the word “mother” in a song because they call Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the democratic revolutionary movement “Mother” and you can’t say “red rose” because of what it symbolizes. Here, we censor ourselves. We can say whatever we want and we censor ourselves for commercial reasons. My heart palpitates to think of it.

It does seem that more and more people in this country are starting to yell about these sorts of things.
Yeah, it is good to see people coming out of the woodwork.

Right after September 11, Bush went on TV and his message to the Iraqis was, “Don’t burn your oil wells” and his message to us Americans was, “Don’t let this interfere with your Christmas shopping.” Do recall your reaction to this?
No, I don’t watch TV.

I watched it on the internet.
I also don’t have a computer, believe it or not. I’m so old school, it’s a little weird. I intentionally tune out that lying, scheming box full of capitalist swine. It’s like slowing down to look at an accident scene for me. It certainly doesn’t help me get through my day. If I want information, if I want news, if I want to keep in touch, I read periodicals like The Nation; truthful news sources. So, no I didn’t watch George Bush tell us all to go shopping, because I can’t.

What do you think about Ralph Nader being boosted by Republicans and him not seeming to care where the support comes from?
Yeah, well, I think Ol’ Ralph has lost it and I think that’s evidence of such. He’s done such amazing work in his activist history, there’s a lot to thank him for, but his path of recent years has been somewhat misguided. I think he was misguided in 2000 and I think he’s even more so now. I tend to just focus on people who I think are really on the right path, so I tend to not talk about him these days.

Had to get that one in there for the magazine. People like an answer to the Nader question. Hopefully next time we can talk about music.
Music, what's that?

We’ll talk about that when there’s a Democrat in office.
Okay, when we can breathe and think of such things.

It seems that your material has gotten more overtly political over the years. Much of your earlier material was more personal than political.
I don’t know about that. It’s funny hearing different people’s takes on whatever it is that I’ve been up to. Some people say that opposite.

With so many records, you could probably pick a handful and go either way.
Exactly. But right from the beginning, it was a sort of political lens I was looking through. Even at 18 or 19, whenever I was first making recordings, I was definitely politically oriented… the thing is my politics, like I think a lot of young women, if you’re an 18-year-old female, you don’t have to look very far outside of your personal life to see political manifestations; I mean, your fucking body. There are people who are trying to reach inside your guts and control your reproductive system for you, saying, You don’t even own your own body.”

And in the name of Jesus, no less.
Yeah, who was a fuckin’ radical revolutionary! And my relationship with men, ya know, gender dynamics. When you’re 5’2” and you’re female and you’re 18-years-old, you’re powerless. You can’t walk around in the day half the time, let alone at night and you’re condescended to, you’re disrespected, you are not recognized for the power that you do have. Women’s power is overlooked, culturally, or within a patriarchy and so that consciousness was there from the beginning. So when I’m writing about, even in the early days, I was writing about my abortion or my relationships, my struggle to become myself; that was extremely political stuff, but in a feminine sense. It’s the other half of the coin from a male folk singer singing the songs of goin’ off to work on the railroad or goin’ off in the army, ya know, “Jimmy is fighting in wherever.” That’s masculine political reflection and just because the feminine may be born closer to home, it’s also political and also real and part of the world and part of the human liberation struggle… what was your question?

When did those thoughts come around to the notion to support certain candidates that you see to be doing good work for the people?
The only candidate I’ve ever really gotten behind or stood next to is Dennis Kucinich, just because he’s a friend of mine. He’s an awesome guy who I met, who I believe in, who is like a comrade. I just happen to have a friend who was running for president, so I was supporting him in whatever way I could and will continue to. What you were getting at is that my writing was blossoming a youth… the responses of an outsider towards a society that they are alien to. When we are young, we are aliens, we’re not part of society. We have no power; we have no control. We’re still learning how things work; the power dynamics. Now, I’m 33 years old and I’m a voting adult; it’s my responsibility to this country and this society. I think that my writing, as I’ve become an adult and begun to shoulder the responsibility for my government, for my society, my writing has reflected that. At 18, I had no part in the society, really. And now I’m speaking more to the Big P political because it’s more a part of my life.

Do you ever feel when traveling in the middle of the country, in less urban populations, where outside information comes almost solely from television, that you’re on another planet in your own country?
Yeah, different audiences have different flavors; there’s a different vibe. To make a big generalization, I tend to feel that places… it’s not even a small town/big town, big city/out-of-the-way place that is the distinction, whether or not the people feel whole. Ya know, the new places that are just all strip malls, that were built on air conditioning and automobiles, where people are living in great isolation and are very much a slave to the television, in those places you feel the disconnection in the audience; the abortion of history. The lack of connectedness. Everywhere I go that has a history, even the tortured history, it feels different; there’s something spiritually intact. That’s why love to go to the old cities or old towns where main street may be abandoned and boarded up, but there is still old architecture that still stands, to be surrounded by history is to know inherently. To grow up in a place like that is to understand inherently, physically, you are connected to what came before you and henceforth, something that comes after. And to understand that, your connectedness and your place in history and that you must think about the future and about the past and heed them both… I just played in Vegas and then in Phoenix and those are places that are especially spiritually diseased. Overrun with commercialism and artificial environments. I especially like playing in Chicago, in Atlanta, even in Cedar Rapids, IA, a place where people are connected. And that has a lot to do with our physical environment, the existence of history around us that also speaks to the future.

How much of this culture was inflicted upon the greater mass and how much is it a byproduct of human nature?
Was it Joseph Campbell? I’m gonna screw up the quote, but basically the sentiment is that all we really want is to be totally human and in each other’s company. And I think that you can feel the cultural disease in this country, especially those of us who leave the country a lot and get that kind of distance of perspective because people are not happy. We are not fulfilling ourselves through commercial accumulation of stuff and of money and leisure because we are not connected, because what we really want is to be in power. People, like you were talking about earlier, we feel helpless, we feel powerless, we feel frustrated, we feel isolated. In terms of your question, I think that it was very calculated “sane washing” effort, the whole Reagan revolution.

A lot of what we’re paying for now was made possible by Reagan’s deregulation.
Deregulation, absolutely. It was just a scourge on our country and on our culture, to see history completely rewritten by the media and he’s just turned into this saint was just nauseating.

That was difficult to take.
Yeah, very hard to take, especially when that whole posse was the one that started steering the whole country into this sort of hell that we’re in now. I just think that the ‘80s Me Generation and the tax breaks for the rich and I think that there’s a baseline of greed that is simply not just accepted, but expected in this culture now. This sort of capitalist mentality reigns supreme. I sort of think of this as a capitalist country now as opposed to a democracy.

A Capitalist Christian country.
Right. As Arundhati Roy would say, the governments, the militaries, the fundamentalists and the capitalists and the international corporate elite are walking hand in hand for global control. Meanwhile, us people are not; it does not service us, it does not allow us to become ourselves. True happiness comes when we are connected, when we are empowered. But we don’t realize this because the television and all of the messages from the media again and again tell us that happiness is achieved materialistically and individually and it’s a fallacy. And it’s gonna take a lot to raise our own consciousnesses above all of these messages that we’re flooded with every day, above the propaganda. We have to, as Abbey Hoffman would say, become the media; tell our own truth, because less and less are we able to find it in the corporate media.

Truth’s kind of become a dirty word.
Or an endangered species. Of course, people want to be comfortable. They don’t want their lives to be difficult, but there are so many different ways of going about this. The truth is that a little bit of difficulty, a little bit of hard work, a little bit of struggle will often lead you to a much higher plain of happiness, of fulfillment, than inaction, apathy and yelling back at your television, but we’ve been encouraged systematically to unlearn this. And we are taught fear, to flee the cities, the urban centers which were constructed to be centers of society where people can be connected, where they can exchange ideas and art and politics, to flee out to the suburbs to these new housing developments with these sterile buildings which have no sense of history or connectedness and literally the streets are these wormy twisting cul-de-sacs that are not connected; you can’t walk around your block, there’s no such thing, you don’t have a neighborhood. These children that grow up there, you simply get in your car and you drive to your individual house and you sit in front of your individual TV. All of these constructions are systematically disconnecting us from each other and from our own power.

Those developments do tend to end in little round termination points. Do you think that’s also partially deliberate?
The thing about conspiracy theories is that they are very simplistic and the world is so complex, so conspiracy theories are often based on the right instincts but are never really… no, I don’t think it’s a grand conspiracy, so, no, but yes. Yes, it is certainly… that’s basically why I didn’t want a record deal. The interest of corporations and the interests of big business and the leaders thereof are fundamentally opposed to the interests of people of community of art and it manifests in a myriad of ways.

Many good independent artists, after proving a following with a few early records, are often then courted by the major players of the industry. Did you start to get offers back when it first became clear that you didn’t need them?
Yeah, absolutely.

And how did that make you feel toward the whole thing?
Especially back in the day that this was happening a lot, it was very, very tempting. Here it is, you’re living hand to mouth, building an audience from the ground up and then here’s some guys come along and they take you out to lunch and they take you out to lunch again and they say, “You could sell millions of records, not hundreds” and “We can make you a star, darling” and over night to boot, instead of a 15-year plan.

That’s a long tour.
Yeah, why bother going on tour when you can just have this “buzz bin” video or whatever? But my reasons why, I just felt them a lot stronger than I did salivating for that carrot. I think that from my father, I got a lot of patience; he was an extremely patient man. So that helped me stay my course. That and a true love of my work. I really fucking love my job. I love to travel around, I love to play music and connect myself with other people; connect a room full of people, help us all come together. The spirit of music is so wonderful that way, so that really helped too. Although someone could always offer to make me more successful or more comfortable more quickly, I was truly happy, in my way, at every phase of this crazy journey. I think a lot of us fall into a trap of always wanting the promotion or “taking it to the next level” or whatever it is people are always talking about, but what about where you are? What’s wrong with that?

You’ve always managed to find solace in those moments?
Yeah. Or just the joy in it; loving playing in bars for handfuls of people, just getting off on it. That helped.

It’s also got to be nice being able to recite your poetry in front of a dead silent packed house at Carnegie Hall.
Yes, of course. But then there’s always the trade off. My life used to be this grand adventure. I was out meeting so many people, it was so memorable, every moment of my early touring. Now, I have tons of help and I have affirmation and I can pay the bills. I have all of these extra resources, but my life is a little more sterile. I get on and off a bus, I play every fuckin’ night. There were things to love about obscurity, and things to love about success.