Ani DiFranco - folk singer - Interview

Q: That surprises me because it doesn't sound that way.

DiFranco: Oh, that's good.

Q: It sounds really spontaneous and light, even though there's heavy politics in there. It sounds like you're just in a living room with friends who are laughing at his stories.

DiFranco: Well, there was certainly a good deal of spontaneity. We had three days of rehearsal. I had been corresponding with Utah, asking him to maybe filter some ideas to me about what he wanted to talk about on this record. Nothing. So the morning of day one was, sit down, start talking, buddy. So I had to order and structure things into songs: OK, let's have one idea be Mother Jones, your story about "The Most Dangerous Woman." One of the things that made the process so strenuous was that Utah had never done a collaboration like that at all. Even to try to give cues--all of that was so foreign to him.

Q: One of the songs you're more actively involved in on this album is "Why Come." This is where I think you're trying to grab your audience by the shirt. [Phillips asks: "Why come young people, with all they have, can't organize to change the conditions of our lives?" And DiFranco echoes, "Why come? Why come?"]

DiFranco: That whole kind of humorous escalation at the end of that song, that was just something I started basically improvising. The way we had rehearsed the ending was a little different, and Utah just kind of ended, and so it was like, OK, and there was that pregnant pause.

Q: Let's talk about your latest album, To the Teeth. Why don't you start with the title song. I assume a school shooting inspired these lyrics:

   open fire on hollywood
   open fire on MTV
   open fire on NBC
   and CBS and ABC
   open fire on the NRA
   and all the lies they told us
   along the way
   open fire on each weapons manufacturer
   while he's giving head
   to some republican senator

DiFranco: Yeah, I wrote it after Columbine. Sometimes I feel fortunate to have retained enough of my innocence in this world to still be living in disbelief at the way society operates. You know, I just can't believe the kind of discourse that happens and does not happen around the gun issue. It seems like a mass insanity to me, like, how we can let business control our society to the extent that our common sense doesn't seem even a factor anymore? You know, just the NRA running the government, and the interests of weapons manufacturers being much more paramount than the interests of people in this country.

It seems obvious to me, if you just look north of the forty-ninth, you can see a country much like our own where the handgun deaths are a tiny fraction of what they are in this country. I just feel we're in a state of crisis at this point, it's so much seeped into our culture. We have a culture of guns and gun romanticism.

In this song, I felt such an urgent need to at least put into the air around myself the way I perceive the issue of a society chock full of guns. Like, how can we allow the media and our entertainment conglomerates to promote guns so much and to foster this romanticism of guns amongst the youth, and how can we allow the NRA to control the government, and how can we allow weapons manufacturers to get more money than our fucking schools?