Ani Difranco Tickets

Ani DiFranco is a singer, guitarist, and songwriter. She is known as a prolific artist and is seen by many as a women's rights and feminist icon. Biography DiFranco was born in Buffalo, New York to an American Jewish mother and an Italian-American father. She started playing Beatles covers at local bars. At the age of eighteen in 1989, DiFranco started her own record company, Righteous Records with just $50. Created prior to 1994 early releases of her cds are labeled with the original Righteous Records label. In the winter of 1990, Ani DiFranco was issued on the label. Later on she relocated to New York City, where she took poetry classes at the New School.

In 1998, she married sound engineer Andrew Gilchrist in Canada, overseen by Unitarian minister Utah Phillips. Numerous media sources reported that her fans felt betrayed by her union with a man. DiFranco and Gilchrist divorced five years later but remained friends. In 1998, DiFranco's drummer, Andy Stochansky, left the band to pursue a solo career as a singer-songwriter.

Recognition
DiFranco received the Woman of Courage Award at the National Organization for Women (NOW) Conference and Young Feminist Summit in Albany On July 21, 2006, NY. Past winners have included singer and actress Barbra Streisand and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. DiFranco is the first musician to receive the award. DiFranco has been toasted by the Buffalo News as the Buffalo's leading lady of rock music. The News further said: Through the Righteous Babe Foundation, DiFranco has backed various grassroots cultural and political organizations, supporting causes ranging from abortion rights to gay visibility. Since 2003, DiFranco has been nominated four consecutive times for Best Recording Package at the Grammy Awards, one of which she won, in 2004, for Evolve.

Musical style and the folk label
DiFranco's guitar playing is often characterized by a signature staccato style,[5][6] rapid fingerpicking and use of a plethora of alternate tunings. She delivers many of her lines in a speaking style notable for its rhythmic variation. Her lyrics, which often include alliteration, metaphor, word play and a more or less gentle irony, have also received praise for their sophistication. The song Talkin' Mrs. DiFranco Blues, by Dan Bern, strings together some of the most memorable lines from DiFranco's early career for comic effects.

Lyrics and politics
Although much of DiFranco's material is autobiographical, it is often also strongly political. Many of her songs are concerned with contemporary social issues such as racism, sexism, sexual abuse, homophobia, reproductive rights, poverty, and war. The combination of personal and political is partially responsible for DiFranco's early popularity among politically active college students, some of whom set up fan pages on the web to document DiFranco's career as early as 1994. Because DiFranco's rapid rise in popularity in the mid-1990s was fueled mostly by personal contact and word of mouth rather than mainstream press, fans often expressed a feeling of community with each other.

Label independence
Ownership of Righteous Babe Records allows DiFranco a great deal of artistic freedom. For example, DiFranco played all of the instruments on her 2004 album Educated Guess, provided all of the vocals, and recorded the album by herself at her home on an analog 8-track reel to reel.

Recent work
On August 8, 2006, DiFranco's newest album, Reprieve, was released. It was beforehand leaked on iTunes for several hours around July 1, 2006, due to an error saying it was released in 2002. DiFranco performed with Cyndi Lauper on Sisters of Avalon. She also performed with fellow folk singer Dar Williams on Comfortably Numb."