Singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco started playing Beatles' songs in local Buffalo, NY bars at age nine, but didn't start writing her own material until age fifteen. :)

Ani has been releasing at least one album a year on her own label (Righteous Babe Records) since 1990. This entry "Educated Guess" is both a departure from 2003's "Evolve" and a logical progression for the native, whose recent works have mixed her spare, acoustic folk with lusher funk and R&B elements.Here she returns to the stark, acoustic feel.

===========================================
ALONENESS WORKS FOR DIFRANCO

The singer-songwriter returns to the stark folk of her roots.

Los Angeles Times
Calendar
Sunday, January, 18, 2004

Ani DiFranco
"Educated Guess"
(Righteous Babe)
3 Stars

Singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco has a knack for looking, seeing and telling. And she has a lot to tell, releasing at least one album a year on her own label since 1990. This entry (in stores Tuesday) is both a departure from 2003's "Evolve" and a logical progression for the Buffalo native, whose recent works have mixed her spare, acoustic folk with lusher funk and R&B elements.

Here she returns to the stark, acoustic feel of earlier recordings, and the sense of isolation in such numbers as "Swim" is reinforced by her creative approach: She single-handedly wrote the songs, played the instruments, sang lead and background vocals and recorded and mixed the collection. Yet "Educated Guess" still incorporates jazz and blues influences into 14 largely melancholy, reflective musings on romance and politics.

With big, open spaces and the stark clash of heavily struck guitar strings, the music feels foreboding and at times almost dissonant, echoing her tense, vividly emotional ruminations about how love can be exhausting and identity-sucking, especially when a partner is endlessly needy.

A handful of frank spoken-word tracks includes "Platforms," an intimate glimpse at the humility of heartbreak, and "Grand Canyon," another of her pieces blending observations of contemporary American life with a specific statement (in this case, that being a patriot partly means celebrating feminism). Even when nursing a bummer, DiFranco still inspires. -- Natalie Nichols

calendarlive.com: Aloneness works for DiFranco
http://www.calendarlive.com/printedition/calendar/
suncal/cl-ca-rack18jan18,2,2169858.htmlstory
==============================================

Our story begins in Buffalo, New York, a rust belt city perched precariously on the edge of the Great Lakes, known best for its terrible snow storms and lost superbowls.

It is here that our heroine, Ani (pronounced AHH-nee) DiFranco was reared on a mid-eighties diet of oat bran and radio mayonnaise, and launched into the world somewhere in the interim between Woody Guthrie's "Pastures Of Plenty" and MTV's unplugged." O.K. Just the facts.

Ani is a punk folksinger who writes songs that can appeal to old folkies and simultaneously climb the college radio charts. She tours on the acoustic, college, and rock club circuits, shattering stereotypes and winning over unsuspecting fans everywhere.

But of course, like all overnight success stories that were ten years in the making, the beginnings were much more humble.

Ani started playing Beatles' songs in local bars at age nine but didn't start writing her own material until age fifteen when she moved out of her mother's apartment. Living on her own, she played every Saturday night at the Essex Street Pub, and at sixteen she graduated from the Visual and Performing Arts High School.

By the time she was eighteen she had played every bar in Buffalo a gazillion times and moved to New York City for a change of scenery.

Now, five years and six albums later, she is still a steadfast independent. To finance her first album, Ani looted her bank account and borrowed the rest from friends. She rejected offers from indie and major labels alike, and instead started her own record company, Righteous Babe Records, in an industry dominated by multinational corporations.

Ani has since sold over one hundred thousand tapes and CD's on her own. She not only writes and publishes her own songs, but also produces her own recordings, creates the artwork, and releases them. She employs like-minded people in management and staff positions, supports local printers and manufacturers in her hometown, and utilizes a network of independent distributors in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

She tours extensively and damn near constantly on both sides of the Atlantic, repeatedly setting on-sight album sales records at music festivals and concert venues.

With a voice that can rock the boat one minute and the cradle the next, Ani DiFranco has a sound like no other. In performance she never ceases to stun and stagger her audience with her famous hundred-fifty watt smile and easy laughter juxtaposed against the brutal poetics of her lyrics and the reckless manhandling of her guitar.

She has played to packed houses and rave reviews from Boston's Somerville Theater to San Francisco's Great American Music Hall, and from Toronto's Phoenix to a twelve-hundred-seat sell-out at Vancouver's Vogue Theatre. As a writer in Tampa exclaimed, "If folk music has a future it's Ani DiFranco."
Courtesy of Righteous Babe Records
=============================================
The LA Times financial section wrote an article about Ani DiFranco distributing her own albums,on her record label, Righteous Babe Records, in which they raved about the business savvy of a singer who thwarted the corporate overhead by choosing to remain independent, thereby pocketing $4.25 per unit, as opposed to the $1.25 made by Hootie and the Blow Fish or the $2.00 made by Michael Jackson. This story was then picked up and reprinted by The New York Times, Forbes magazine, and the Financial News Network.
=============================================
An Open Letter from Ani DiFranco  (A Thank You Letter, But....To Ms. Magazine)
http://www.columbia.edu/~marg/ani/letter.html

Very insightful, modest, thoughtful, amusing, informative letter.
=============================================