She’s as pissed off as Fiona Apple, but sings about her anger as delicately as Jewel. Over the years, Ani DiFranco has been called the heir to Joni Mitchell’s throne, but the truth is the songwriter has carved a niche all her own.
Despite averaging an album a year since she started her song-writing career in 1990, DiFranco still has a lot to say. “Reprieve,” her 18th studio album, released in August by her label Righteous Babe Records, covers much new ground lyrically and musically, while still feeling familiar to the listener.
DiFranco and bassist Todd Sickafoose are the only two who play instruments on this follow-up to 2005’s “Knuckle Down,” which at time causes it to be a little musically sparse, but her enchanting voice floating over acoustic melodies is certainly easy on the ears.
She began recording the album in New Orleans in 2005 and was forced to evacuate during Hurricane Katrina and headed back to her hometown in Buffalo to salvage what she could of the recording.
“Reprieve” is a canvas for DiFranco’s thoughts and feelings about events this past year, ranging from the political to personal.
The overtly political song “Millennium Theater” serves as an eerie prophetic look at the disaster that was Katrina, while the opening track “Hypnotized” speaks of difficulty in relationships. “Decree” articulates her disenchantment with the media machine, while the title track “Reprieve” covers the gamut from feminism to reproductive rights to Hiroshima.
Tying in to the title track, the album cover features a drawing inspired by a photo taken in Nagasaki, Japan, hours after the explosion of the atomic bomb. The piece depicts a tree with half the foliage missing, the other half’s branches and leaves stretching skyward toward the sun. The tree represents the political and personal unrest she sings about, while revealing there is still hope.
DiFranco’s sentiment echoes the broken-hearted anticipation of the tree when she sings, “I ain’t in the best shape that I’ve ever been in. But I know where I’m going and it ain’t where I’ve been.”
