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ANI DIFRANCO TALKS ABOUT THE MAKING OF KNUCKLE DOWNQ: Your most recent album before this one, Educated Guess, was very much a one-person show, with you as sole performer, producer, even engineer. Knuckle Down seems to be a complete about-face.
A: Well, yes, it was time to get out of my hole and work with other people again. The trajectory of my life has been very solitary, and my art goes with that, but whenever my heart sees a chance for collaboration, it leaps to it. I just crave that kind of input. I don't have nearly as much of it as I'd like in my life. Especially for the past few years, I've had more than my share of time to think my own tiny thoughts — to think and overthink things — and, you know, lose track of what it is I'm supposed to be thinking about. At this point I look at Educated Guess and I think, "How did I do that?" How did I get up and be disciplined enough in my time off to set up microphones and try and make a record without any interaction with anybody? I'm really glad I did it, [just] to prove to myself that I could, but it's very helpful to have somebody else working the machines so that you can make the art. You know, you want to be getting warmed up, you want to be getting focused, you want to be getting yourself there as an artist to perform, and getting used to the sounds and the space, but you're not. You're running back and forth, futzing and futzing. It's very hard to just [snaps fingers] be all those people. Q: Let's talk about your co-producer, Joe Henry, and his role on the album. How did you first hear about him? A: Through recordings; I was an admirer of his last few records — Scar in particular. I invited him out to share the stage, and we just struck up a friendship and started talking about making records — which both of us do, serially [laughs] — and really hit it off. We had a real lively creative dialogue going, so I took that as my cue to step out of my solitude and work with a co-producer for the first time — invite collaboration back into my life. I think Joe played the role of catalyst as much as anything for this project. Q: You've mentioned that you and Joe have similar approaches to making records. Can you describe that shared sensibility? A: Well..., tracking live, only spending a couple of days — you walk into the studio prepared to make music, ready to lay it down. You don't go in and learn the songs or do a million takes, or perfect and piece things together or overdub until you're blue. You just go hit it and keep it organic and make it a performance. Q: What do you mean when you describe Joe's role as "catalyst"?
A: I invited him to co-produce my new record — and I had, like, 3 songs. [laughs] He said yes, and I said, 'Whoa, okay, time to get to writin'. We started plotting out the time frame of the record and scheming about the cast. So I wrote to a deadline, in a sense, which I've never done. I usually just wait till there's a pile of songs and go record them. This time, I had not only a deadline, but a context to write for: the group of musicians that I was gonna work with, and the where, how, and when of the record. I knew I wanted to have string accompaniment on this record — I thought I'd get string-y with it rather than get horn-y with it like I have in the past — use those kinds of colors. It was kind of cool to flex that writing muscle and be real craftsmanlike about it, more so than in the past, when I was just completely at the whim of and on the schedule of my muse. Q: This time you recorded in a studio in L.A., as opposed to your house? A: Yep. These days my "home studio" is much more a home than a studio. It's one thing to record myself solo there, it's another thing to track a whole band, which was what this plan called for. So one of Joe's contributions was the place that we worked — the studio in L.A. — which really was a factor of the engineer, who is somebody he's worked with a lot and who had a huge hand in the sound of the record: Husky Hoskolds. It's a studio that he likes to work at. Husky has this whole sonic palette that he works with when he records, so I sort of pushed that into the direction of my music until we arrived at a hybrid. I think it was a very successful kind of collaboration. Joe also brought the drummer, Jay Bellerose, and the keyboard vibemaster, Patrick Warren, into the mix. And I went out there with Todd [Sickafoose, bass player] and invited Andrew Bird, Noe Venable, Tony Scherr, and Julie Wolf to play, so I had my crew kinda there contributing as well. I'm very pleased with the special guests that appear, because I feel like they're really there as themselves. Their character appears on the record; it's not like they just play the notes [they were told to play, like session musicians]. I think they all brought a lot of inspiration with them. Q: It must have been very different putting together the last album, where you could get up in the middle of the night and record. A: Yes, the actual recording of this album was the very opposite experience: go to La La Land and cower in disgust on my way to and from this Hollywood studio, and just lay it down in 6 days — 2 songs a day, including the process of basically teaching them to half the band. That was a lot of work, and we were leaving really early! [laughs] We would leave by, like, 8 o'clock at night, or 11 at most, because people had families. As a singer, as the artiste, it was funny; it was towards the end of the week before I turned around and thought, "Whose schedule is this? Who came up with this get-up-in-the-morning-and-sing business?" It was a challenge on a lot of levels to just go and hit it. When it came down to actually recording the album, I found it much as it has always been: the buck stops here, in terms of arranging and performing and making all the decisions. But during the preproduction of the record, I really enjoyed having Joe as a sounding board, and the kind of fantasizing that we did about the project. I met with Joe before the recording session and I played him the tunes. There was one tune that I was working on that was in a much earlier form. I had all these different guitar riffs, ones that were hanging around for months and months and not fleshing themselves out into songs. And Joe said, "That riff, I like that." So I made that sort of the center of "Lag Time". I wrote the song around it. In writing, you know, a song is like these leaves scattered everywhere in the fall, all of these ideas, and you start raking them up into a pile and stuffing them into a bag, making a certain shape and form for them, and some of them just fly off in the wind. Joe helped me sort of decide which direction to go with that particular song. Q: Todd Sickafoose has been accompanying you in your live shows for a while now. A: He's incredible. He's breathed new life into my love of performance. I sort of had my arc with the band, and then I played solo for a few years, and I was starting to get a little sick of the sound of my own voice again. Just then, Todd came along, and, whew, it's just the best thing ever. I re-met him when he and Noe Venable opened for me last year. He's Noe's musical collaborator and ex-partner; I was like, "Hmmm. Noe... can I borrow Todd? [laughs] Indefinitely?" Q: So it's back to the dynamic of you and one other person on stage?
A: Yes, yes. Which hasn't existed since the Andy Stochansky days and is really my favorite thing, I've decided. It's sort of like all of the excitement of playing music with somebody, but all of the freedom of being solo, almost. If I have an accompanist who is a really good listener and really intuitive and we get a whole subliminal groove on, then, you know, I find I can still be as spontaneous, unpredictable, and extemporaneous as I can when I'm solo. That kind of exchange of energy can be so synergistic. It just feels right. I was playing solo for so long and then I got a band; I felt like I could do things with them that I couldn't do solo, so I tried those things. Then I bid farewell to the band, and I felt like I could finally do things solo that I just couldn't do with a band — you know, reach levels of intimacy, or focus. Now with Todd I feel the same again; there are places that we go that I could never reach alone. That sort of focus times two. Q: I can only think of one song on Knuckle Down — "Paradigm" — that is overtly political in the conventional sense, and it seems like this is the first album since maybe Dilate where that was the case. I know this is a radical oversimplification, but — A: — No, I'm down with it, as radical oversimplifications go! [laughs] Yeah, well, again, I sort of sat down and wrote these songs within a few months. I was just a writing fool [laughs]; there's an emotional moment that's definitely being explored, since that was a lot of what was going on with me. Yeah, and now I've already sort of half written another record — because that's the way it goes [laughs] — and [that one contains] a lot of political stuff. There are certain times when you are ingesting the outside world and processing through your personal world, and there are other times when you're reacting to/speaking back to the outside world and your personal life is just coasting comfortably. Q: You don't tend to make the age-old distinction between the "personal" and the "political." A: Not as much as the rest of the world does. To me it's all an expression of a perspective, and things are very rarely exclusively either political or personal. They're always both in my mind or my heart or that place that inspires me to write. So, no, I just write about what's on my mind, and that shifts like weather. The song "Paradigm" is pretty much a definitive statement of my political focus this past year. A lot of the work that I have been doing has just been talking to people about becoming citizens again and exercising our rights, our power — we have so much unused power that it just hurts me. Q: In the song, you acknowledge that paying taxes is part of the essence of democracy. Taxes in themselves are not this inherently bad thing which must be eliminated. A: Yeah, yeah. [The move to cut them is] just playing into this baseline greed our culture is focused on now. That's selfishness. But look at them Canadians: they pay all kinds of taxes. And they put 'em to good use, and they're pretty happy. Pretty progressive. Pretty balanced society. I think we have the choice between Big Government and Big Business. The former will answer to the people sooner than the latter, if you ask me. We can certainly make this so with a little bit of personal investment. Q: Of course, "Paradigm" is also a very personal song. A: Always. Q: It's true — all of your songs are very firstperson, no matter what you're singing about. A: Yeah, that's part of my mechanism. But I wouldn't want this record portrayed as just a personal record, because although there's not a lot of political songs, it's all connected, all the ingredients are there, just with new flavors and proportions. Q: Speaking of "person" in that sense, you've always written a lot in the second person. A lot of your songs over the years tend to be addressed to "you".
A: Yeah. I think that's one of my favorite things about the English language: that I can write to you, which is either you, a singular other person, or you, as in everyone else, the-rest-of-the-world you. And English is unique in that way. In all the romance languages, the languages that we're so connected to, you have to specify what kind of you you're talking to. And I just love that about English, because it really works for the whole songwriting thing, because songs are always letters to myself and to another person, so the you is always specific and yet universal, because you're always just speaking to the whole world when you speak to one person. It's like you're just giving voice to yourself, and that works very well in terms of singing to people. Q: The spoken-word piece "Parameters" is one of those second-person tales where the "you" seems to be yourself — A: — Oh, I don't know. It kind of trips and drifts all over. Q: I guess you're right. But that particular poem seems like a beautiful illustration of taking something that is very specific to you, and making it this very universal kind of song. A: Yeah, that's sort of my way, to try to take from my personal experience and find in it the universal. To make it useful to others. My friend Erin McKeown was listening to that track the other day and she said, "I can totally feel that feeling of anxiety, that whatever-it-is-that-haunts-you button getting pushed." Q: Have you performed "Parameters" live? A: Yeah, it's a tough one. You need just the right space to perform it in. It has worked out so it's been very creepy and effective, and then the other night it was on the set list in New York, and I didn't realize it at first, but the audience was just so hyper — you know, they came out of the box just screaming and on their feet. And so that was a really hard night to do that poem. Every afternoon I sort of try and divine how the evening will go, and I was a little off that night. Q: What led you to make "Knuckle Down" the title song of the album? A: It was just an intuitive choice, because the expression "knuckle down" seemed to me to apply to the album as a whole, a running theme [laughs], if you will. It was one of the first songs I wrote for the record. Actually, it sort of got bumped from Educated Guess; it didn't quite take form until just after that record was complete, and it felt like a foreshadowing of the record I was then ready to work on. I think if you look back at all my scads of records and all of their titles, together they make a little poem that is me. Which is maybe connected to the way that I don't feel political writing to be separate from personal writing — because, again, it's all just a person's perspective revealed. Peeling patches of paint. Whether it's a personal relationship or a societal dynamic or whatever it is I'm writing about, it's just an expression of my nature... being affected by the world. For whatever reason, the titles I finally settle on [tend to have] several levels of meaning for me, in terms of the individual songs that they come from, and the group of songs they speak to, and the person that gave birth to them and carries them around. Interview by Ron Ehmke |
