Ani DiFranco

Ani DiFranco, born Angela Maria DiFranco in Buffalo, New York, on September 23, 1970, started performing before she was a teenager: she played Beatles covers and busked with her guitar teacher, Michael Meldrum, at age nine, and was writing her own songs by fourteen. She left her mother's apartment at fifteen as an emancipated minor and began playing bars and coffee houses through her teens.

She set up Righteous Babe Records in 1989, at nineteen, and released her self-titled debut the following winter after moving to New York City, where she also took poetry classes and found a mentor in poet Sekou Sundiata. She has released more than twenty albums on the label since, becoming a frequently cited example of an artist working outside the major-label system.

Her playing is percussive and rhythmic, often in open or altered tunings and with her fingers taped, drawing on folk rock and alternative rock alongside punk, funk, hip-hop and jazz. Her writing moves between intimate songs and directly political material addressing feminism, war and American politics, and she counts Pete Seeger among her early mentors.

Albums including "Not a Pretty Girl," "Dilate" and "Little Plastic Castle" built her audience through relentless touring, including a 1996 stretch with bassist Sara Lee documented on the live album "Living in Clip." DiFranco has also performed and organised benefit concerts and albums for social causes, and her Righteous Babe Foundation supports grassroots groups working on abortion rights and LGBTQ visibility.

She published a memoir, "No Walls and the Recurring Dream," in 2019, which made the New York Times bestseller list, and in 2024 made her Broadway debut playing Persephone in Hadestown, a role she had already voiced on the show's original concept album.