“All these things are happening, and somehow it’s like they’re happening in the background – while Broadway is sitting on my face.”

Ani DiFranco is summing up her current reality with the kind of disarming frankness that’s defined her artistry for over three decades. Talking from New York over Zoom, while her kids potter around in the background, the singer-songwriter tells me that she’s currently in the home stretch of her run of Hadestown shows, having made her Broadway debut in Anaïs Mitchell’s Tony Award-winning musical earlier this year.

Although the “totally insane job”, as she describes it, is a career-first for Ani, she’s no stranger to the role of Persephone. She provided the voice for the character in the concept album the musical was based on, released by Anaïs back in 2010, via the proudly independent label Righteous Babe Records, which Ani set up when she was barely out of her teens.

Although she claims that “warp speed” was her go-to approach in her younger years, an eight-show week is an incredibly intense experience for any performer – especially one who’s balancing it with the release of her 23rd album, the aptly titled Unprecedented Sh!t.

INTENTION OF GREED

From a cult hero in the ‘90s, to a pioneering champion of the DIY movement in modern music, Ani’s work has always been defined by her defiant activism, and a complete rejection of categorisation and labels. Her remarkable journey – which has also featured collaborations with the eclectic likes of Prince, Cyndi Lauper, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Janis Ian and Utah Phillips – is now getting the documentary treatment, in the form of 1-800-ON-HER-OWN, which premiered last month at the Tribeca Film Festival.

Following 22 previous albums, Unprecedented Sh!t marks a notable shift in direction, with Ani teaming up with boundary-pushing producer BJ Burton, renowned for his work with the likes of Bon Iver and Charli XCX.

“A big part of my MO in life has been self-sufficiency,” the artist, who became an emancipated minor when she was 15, tells me. “It’s something that I had to learn as a kid, and I just carried it forward a long time. So I usually just go off by myself, like a cat, and make a record!

“But I’ve been growing weary of it,” she continues. “My new interest is collaboration – which is showing up all over my life now that I’m reaching for it. And one way I did that was to say, ‘I want a producer.  Someone who’ll really get into this record with me. All the way in.’”

BJ soon proved to be ‘that guy’, she says – helping her to expand her sonic horizons, and embrace “this world of machines that we live in.”

Of course, as she sings on the track ‘New Bible’, all that technology “gets you nowhere if your intentions are all wrong...”

“That line could speak to a lot of things, and one of them is the algorithms upon which our computers operate,” she elaborates. “The way they’re designed is reflective of the perspective of the people who made them – who are generally white males.

“We have the technology and the capability to live sustainably on this planet,” she adds. “To live cooperatively, with all other lifeforms, as nature intends. Yet we’re using our technology to destroy our host and all other lifeforms – and eventually ourselves. Why? For the intention of greed, and personal gain for very few.”

FREEDOM AND AGENCY

Never one to shy away from political and social commentary in her work, Ani also returns to the issue of reproductive rights on Unprecedented Sh!t.

“I’ve always felt very strongly that reproductive freedom is a civil rights issue for women – and that, in order to have our full civil right rights as citizens, we have to be in charge of when and how we give birth, or not,” she states. “That’s so very primary to our freedom and agency. So I’ve been writing about it for as long as I’ve been writing.”

The single ‘Baby Roe’ was directly inspired by Joshua Prager’s 2021 The Family Roe, which follows the lives of the real people behind the historic 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v Wade, which established the constitutional right to an abortion – and was infamously overturned in June 2022.

“Really, until we have a constitutional amendment, we will always be on the frontlines of this battle,” Ani remarks. “It’s become a political device by the conservative right. This book talks about how that came to be – how women’s bodies were turned into a political game.”

Since the overturning of that landmark Supreme Court decision, Ani – probably speaking for a lot of her fellow Americans – has found there’s been “no end to the surreal happenings over here.”

“It’s crazy times – hence the name of the record!” she says. “Trump’s on the campaign trail again... None of this can be imagined or believed. It’s just somehow happening.”

But Ani, true to form, isn’t burying her head in the sand. In the run-up to November’s elections, she’s promoting the importance of civic duty with the release of her children’s book, Show Up And Vote.

The book arrives at a time of growing disillusionment among American voters. It’s a feeling Ani, despite her strong activist stance, can relate to.

“All the time,” she nods. “Just about every time I go to vote! I don’t skip there – and I don’t hoot and holler when I pull the lever!”

But what’s often forgotten in “this age of hyper-individualism”, she says, is that “voting is a service.”

“It’s not about performing yourself – which is what everyone does for these tiny screens – or gratifying yourself,” she remarks. “It’s about serving your communities, your neighbours and the people in your society who have less than you.

“People often complain, and for good reason, about voting for the lesser of two evils, and how unsatisfying that can be,” she continues. “And Goddess knows, I get it! I am as disillusioned as the next guy a lot of the time. But I show up and I vote every single time – because I’m fully aware that the lesser of two evils can be life or death for somebody. Not me, because I’m lucky in a lot of ways. But for somebody else, that’s going to be life or death.

“In America, we need to rediscover ourselves as a collective, and as members of something bigger than ourselves,” she adds. “Voting is a great way to remember: ‘It’s not about you. It’s about us.’”

Ani DiFranco. Credit: Danny Clinch

Back in October, Ani was one of a group of major names – including the likes of Dua Lipa, Michael Stipe, Florence Pugh and Macklemore – who signed an open letter to Biden, calling for “an immediate de-escalation and ceasefire in Gaza and Israel.” It’s a cause that’s been important to the singer-songwriter her “whole life”, she tells me.

“I’ve been showing up to Free Palestine demonstrations since I was a teenager,” she recalls. “I haven’t been super involved in 2024, just because I’ve been scrambling to keep up with the daily gauntlet of this job, and all the requirements around it. Honestly, I haven’t even really turned on the news this year.

“But it’s one of many examples of American imperialism – how we arm and prop up governments in our favour, for various reasons,” she resumes. “And they aren’t necessarily agents of liberation, benevolence, democracy and equality. All over the world, there are many examples of the American government fostering violence and oppression.”

LABELS AND DESCRIPTORS

As an unapologetically outspoken artist, Ani has weathered her fair share of controversies over the course of her career – from various sides of the political spectrum. At 53, and as a self-professed “old-school” feminist, she admits that she feels somewhat out-of-step with some of the new ways that debates and conversations about social issues take place.

“There’s just a low degree of tolerance for difference, amongst people of all different stripes,” she says. “To question things is to raise a sword against them. So I find it hard to even bring questions into the process.

“But in my songs, that’s my sacred space,” she continues. “I need to have a space where I can just say what I feel, and be who I am. If I’m going to get cancelled or yelled at, or somebody’s going to turn their back and walk away, then so be it.”

A central theme at the heart of Unprecedented Sh!t is the rejection of labels, which was partially inspired by ongoing discussions about identity.

“That’s running through this record: finding a place to live that’s not subject to adjectives and labels and descriptors and us-ing and them-ing – and all the social orders that we create and manipulate,” she nods. “Finding a place where I’m a being of light, and so are you. And we’re actually one. The rest is an illusion.

“That’s the peaceful centre of the record, that the singer is pointing towards and striving for, in the noise of culture and politics.”

Of course, Ani hasn’t lost all hope. There’s many young emerging artists she admires, who are following in her own fiery footsteps.

“The other day, when the film came out, Katie Gavin of MUNA did a Q&A with me afterwards,” she recalls. “So she comes to mind straight away as an example of somebody who’ll say to my face, ‘You were a great inspiration, and I’m standing on your shoulders.’

“With every generation, that’s hopefully how it works – we lift each other up,” she adds. “Those that come next, we provide them with more room to live and to be. I feel proud to have been a part of that process, which is bigger than me.”

The late singer-songwriter Michael Meldrum was a crucial part of Ani’s own musical education, when she was growing up in Buffalo, New York. From the age of nine, she was “his sidekick,” she says, shadowing him around local open mics and folk gigs, before finding her own community as part of the folk/roots underground scene.

NO SLEEP FOR THREE DAYS

From the out-set, she’s always maintained a similar ethos as the current wave of innovative Irish acts – combining a deep respect for folk music with a healthy enthusiasm for expansion and experimentation.

“The minute people start treating the traditions like things you hang on the wall in a museum, they start to die,” she asserts. “A layer of dust forms, and it doesn’t breathe or move or grow. It doesn’t remain relevant to people’s lives.

“I was somebody who showed up on the folk circuit in America when I was still a teenager,” she continues. “I looked different, I sounded different – but I was very much going around calling myself a folk singer. I was playing that acoustic guitar, and bringing politics into my songs, and being a part of social movements, and being an activist and an artist. Doing all the things that a folk singer does! I just did it my own way.

“It’s great to hear about young people in any culture remembering where they came from, and giving a shit. And really picking it up and playing with it, as young people do.”

She reflected on those early years in her memoir, No Walls And The Recurring Dream, which made the New York Times Best Seller list, following its release in 2019. But I imagine that looking back on her life and career as it’s presented in the new documentary must have been surreal in its own right – and emotional.

“It definitely would have been – if I had watched it!” Ani laughs. “I saw an early edit once upon a time, on [director] Dana Flor’s laptop in her kitchen, and I gave a few comments. But beyond that, I don’t know if I’ll ever watch it. It’s just not what my head needs.

“After the premiere of it, I played a few songs, and there was an after-party – and I feel like I saw the movie through the eyes of all the other people that I talked to there. They told me what they got out of it, and what they felt. That’s good enough for me!”

For now, with her Broadway run wrapping up, Ani’s immediate plan is to head up to the woods of Quebec, where her mother is from, and spend time with her family. But she hints that she’ll be hitting the road again in early 2025 – and her tour might, fingers crossed, bring her back to Ireland…

“I just hope when we come it won’t be Midnight at the Olympia!” she laughs. “Between that and the ferry, it was basically no sleep for three days. But it was fun!”

Unprecedented Sh!t is out now.