Born in Buffalo, NY in 1970, Ani's first interests were dance and visual art. Her earliest awareness of music came not from pop albums and radio airplay, but from first-hand encounters with working musicians in Buffalo bars, many of whom stayed overnight with her family on their way across the Northeast. The intimacy and hand-to-mouth economics of the folk tradition fueled Ani's own passion for live performance, and she began singing and playing acoustic guitar in these same Rust Belt bars before she was 10 years old. By age 15, she was writing songs of her own and hitting the regional coffeehouse and club circuit herself.

By the time she decided to record a cassette in 1990, Ani had more than 100 original compositions to choose from. Ani's lyrics, then as now, were as plainspoken as they were poetic; she wrote about the world around her, using her own experience as a starting (never an ending) point. Like countless performers before her, Ani chose to release that first album herself, without the financial backing of a able. Borrowing money from friends to cover the costs of incorporation and studio time, 20 year old Ani produced her own self-titled debut album and sold it from the trunk of her hand-painted car while blazing a path across the college campuses and seedy dives of America.

Those live shows, along with fourth-generation dubs of several early, acoustically spare recordings, sparked interest in Ani from coast to coast. Fans invariably asked for not just one album but every album Ani would ever produce; which then became fodder for homemade mix tapes passed from friend to friend. Offers from labels large and small began to pop up more and more often, but unlike most young artists under similar circumstances, Ani decided to continue releasing albums herself (11 of 'em by early 1998), which allowed her a far greater degree of artistic control than any outside interest would have provided. To this day, Ani has the last word on how often her albums come out, what songs they contain, what the graphics and accompanying merchandise look like, which singles and videos get released, and so on.

But Righteous Babe is no longer a dining-room-table operation. In the eight years since the first album, Ani has played larger and larger venues (currently averaging 2-6000 seats), sold more and more records (over 1,120,000 at last count), made the covers of various national magazines, and appeared several times on network television. Each of these developments, while not an end in itself, has provided the impetus for new opportunities. Ani's income from concerts and record sales get channeled directly back into future projects, which in turn allow her to support like-minded fellow artists, Buffalo businesses, and grassroots culture workers.

Everything happens organically in DiFranco-land. After figuring out for herself over the course of many albums how to capture her sound in the studio, Ani has become a sought-after producer (Janis Ian, Dan Bern) and guest vocalist and guitarist (Bruce Cockburn). She has contributed to the soundtracks of films from low-budget student projects to "My Best Friend's Wedding" and "The Jackal". And she has even begun to release work by other artists on her label, starting with her critically acclaimed collaboration with folk legend Utah Phillips, "The Past Didn't Go Anywhere."

There is no single sound or song which encapsulates the range of Ani's craft. Over the course of her career so far, she has performed solo, with accompanying bass and drums, and, on one memorable occasion, with the Buffalo Philharmonic; in the studio, she has employed horn sections, gospel singers, sample, and answering machine recordings; she has released spoken word tracks, dance remixes, and a double live album. The only constants in Ani's world are her commitment to writing and performing intensely personal songs, her fans' deep connection to her work, and her intuitive insistence on doing things her own way. -Righteous Babe Records