The first sentence of the bio on Ani DiFranco’s website gets right to the point: “Widely considered a feminist icon, Grammy winner Ani DiFranco is the mother of the DIY movement, being one of the first artists to create her own record label in 1990.” That label, Righteous Babe, has not only released DiFranco’s 23 studio albums but also artists who likewise use a folk base to relay their particular creative visions: Andrew Bird, Bitch and Animal, Anais Mitchell, Utah Phillips, Toshi Reagon and Dar Williams, to name a handful.
DiFranco was 19 when she created Righteous Babe to disseminate her view of the world. The Buffalo, New York, native was especially busy in the 1990s, delivering 10 full-length albums during the decade, a whirlwind of writing, recording and touring that didn’t shy away from highlighting her political and social beliefs at a time when being an opinionated bisexual woman wasn’t the norm.
“These records that I made all on my own are an acquired taste,” DiFranco said in an interview earlier this year with The Guardian. “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, etcetera. But anything worthwhile involves sacrifice.”
DiFranco’s most recent album, 2024’s Unprecedented Shit, features 11 songs over 37 minutes, each tune an exploration of its creator’s unique headspace three decades into a career that shows no signs of slowing. “Baby Roe” is the most sonically intriguing of the new material; it opens with jittery synths, rhythms and acoustic guitar backing DiFranco’s expressive sing/speak vocals before exploding at the chorus with thundering drums as she bellows, “The path of least suffering/Leaves the best trail/The path of least suffering/It don’t matter which side of the veil.” Given the song’s title, the matter at hand seems to be the current state of the abortion debate, yet the oblique lyrics leave room for multiple interpretations as things conclude with this thought: “I think we might be wrong about all of it.”
Ani DiFranco and Hurray for the Riff Raff play Taft Theatre on Sept. 3 at 8 p.m. More info: tafttheatre.org.
This story is featured in CityBeat’s Aug. 20 print edition.
This article appears in Aug 20 – Sep 2, 2025.