ANI DIFRANCO TALK ABOUT HER NEW ALBUM, "LIVING IN CLIP"
Q: Where did the title come from?
A: It's a quote from our very own PA Tech, Larry I Berger, about the state of my power amps on tour. 'Cuz I'm
known for blowing speakers nationwide! We send out contracts that say I need a certain amount of power to play,
and a certain size of speakers, but people look at the fact that I play an acoustic guitar and they think, 'Oh, we'll
bring the wimpy little folk PA' -- and I just blow it up. (laughs) My guitar drives pretty hard, live, and it became this
saying on tour: "She's living in clip." The little red warning light just goes on, and stays on, the whole show.
Q: What live albums by other artists do you like?
A: Maceo Parker, "Live on the Planet Groove," one of my favorite albums in the world. Tom Waits, "Nighthawks
at the Diner," good live album. See, I don't really have a lot of live albums, I haven't really heard many.
In my mind, "Clip" is probably my best album by far, because it is a representation of what I do as opposed to an
approximation, but I think that live albums are generally not taken as seriously as studio albums, cuz they usually
suck: that's my belief, and people who know corroborate this without exception.
Q: OK, so why release one yourself?
A: Because my fans have been asking for one since the dawn of time! 'Cuz basically that's what I do: I perform.
Like I've written in the liner notes, my studio albums are suspect at best, if not downright embarrassing. And I think
it's largely a factor of me just not being a studio musician. I think there are two kinds of musicians: People who live
in their basements and twiddle knobs, and people who drive around. I think there's an inherent difference between
people who make albums, and then have to drag themselves on tour and are traumatized by the stage but have to
promote the albums, and people who just tour and have to be dragged into a recording studio to approximate their
songs onto tape. I think the whole folksinger tradition, the whole oral-history, traveling troubadour-minstrel biz, it's
a much different mindset, a different set of priorities. Most folksingers that I know, their albums don't come near
what they do live. You can't really play an album of a folksinger for somebody and say, "Oh, check this out, this
person's really cool." It's all about the performance. So I think I like this album a lot better than the studio albums,
just because it sounds like me, playing music, whereas most of the others sound to me like me trying to make an
album.
When I walk up on stage, I just start singing. When I walk into a recording studio, I try to sing. And it always
sounds worse! I'm getting closer to really just singing in a recording studio, just making music and not trying to
make music, but I still have a ways to go. When I grow up, that's what I wanna learn how to do...
Q: You didn't mike the audience on this album. Why not?
A: It's pretty much unheard of to make a live album without miking the audience, and without overdubbing the
vocals and the guitars and everything afterwards. ... All those classic-rock live albums, you mike the audience and
then you have canned audience sounds, and you just pound 'em in there at the end of the song. And for us it was
the complete opposite: the audience was just being picked up by my vocal mike, which is screamingly loud at any
given moment, and the whole challenge of the project was how to quiet them down!
I have an attitude about my audience, because I have a fucking attitude about everything, but the truth is that they're
really incredible. I've got them very well trained! (laughs) People who go to the shows and who know live
performance, who have spent their lives in rock 'n' roll, have commented on it. Basically, you have two kinds of
audience: You have the silent, motionless, listening audience for jazz or folk or whatever, and then you have your
screaming, partying, rock 'n' roll audience, and to have an audience that has mastered both, that can come up and
down with the dynamics of the song, is an amazing thing. It's reflected on the album pretty nicely, I guess; you can
hear 'em losing their shit, and then you can hear 'em all shut up and hear a fuckin' pin drop at the back of the theater
on the tape, which is a testament to them. But I've always been interested in music that has that dynamic, that isn't a
kind of Wall of Noise rock 'n' roll mania, but isn't some kind of comatose easy listening music, either.
There were some tracks that we couldn't use because [the fans] were so loud. It was an ongoing joke in the studio
that, at the end of certain poignant lines or verses, it just sounds like a rollercoaster goes by. If you think of it that
way, it's just so funny: "Lah dee dah dee dah ... YAAAAAAAAAAH!!! Lah dee dah dee dah ...
YAAAAAAAAAAH!!!"
There was a version of, like, "32 Flavors" or some lilting, chilled-out hip-hop ... in which there's just so many
people screaming and hooting, and it completely destroys the vibe. Maybe in the moment people are in some kind
of rapture, but on tape you cannot listen to it repeatedly. It's the kind of track you'd have to fast-forward past.
There were a few tracks like that, where we had to do little tricks, like in between verses when I'm not singing,
kinda pull my vocal mike down to quiet them down, because they can be pretty crazy -- and so they should be,
'cuz I'm fucking crazy, and it's only fair, I guess! (laughs)
Q: How did you select the material for "Living in Clip"?
A: The whole process of our recording was kind of unique, actually. I don't think it's been done very often: we kind
of invented our own system. ADAT -- 8 digital tracks, basically a fucking videotape -- is a somewhat new formula,
and we came up with this technique for recording straight off the board, but the recording process was very
haphazard. There's a lot of digital dropout on a lot of the tapes, there are these electric blips and snicks, which
made a lot of tracks unusable. I mean, there's whole nights in which the vocal wasn't recorded for some reason.
And then the chaos of live performance is unending. So to find tracks that didn't have some kind of screaming
feedback or some person jumping up on stage or some kind of interruption which doesn't translate onto a
recording, it pretty much narrowed things down.
We only recorded shows in North America, so all of the touring outside the United States wasn't recorded. And
even then, there were several tours which weren't recorded. So we had a select amount of tapes to choose from. I
picked mostly songs that have changed a lot since their first appearance on the studio albums, songs that have
mutated into something completely different than any other version. I tried to put in the ones that people always
wanna hear--the "classic hits"-- off all the albums, and songs that I know I'll never fucking play again on stage
(laughs), ones that I've forgotten, and the like, since the other ones are just gonna continue to change. There are
some obscure songs on the album, too. Basically, it's sort of a year retrospective, an incomplete one (smiles). Sort
of like, "the flava of 1996."
Q: So what's that flava sound like, exactly?
A: The album has a few tracks of me playing solo, but the 15 years before these recordings that I played music
solo isn't really represented so much. There's a few tracks from November/December 95, where it was just me
and Andy [Stochansky, drums], before Sara [Lee, bass] started playin' with me, but it's mostly band tracks. The
album pretty much represents that band, and what we were about at the time, and Andy and Sara are huge parts of
the album.
To find a version of a song that I've played live in which I don't say anything in the middle, I don't fuck up, I'm not
laughing or joking or stomping around or screaming, is quite difficult. I'm not one of those musicians who gets up on
stage and tries to approximate the album. Again, it's all about the performance, and I'm not precious about my
songs, so I'll interrupt them with anything. But I tried to give a sort of accurate impression of what the shows are
like, without being self-indulgent, making people sit through long, verbose, incoherent interludes. But I didn't want
to just try and edit out all the chaos, because it wouldn't be an accurate depiction. So you've got your little
soundbites, and you've got songs in which I'm just spielin' in the middle.
Q: Several tracks sound like they're overdubbed, but in your liner notes you say that isn't the case.
A: One of the ongoing missions of mine in performance for the past few years has been how to make a guitar sound
like a band -- it was that style that I developed of being my own rhythm section and then playing the melodic lines
and the bassline and the bottom -- and then how to make a duo, an acoustic guitar and drums, be as full as
possible so people don't come to a show and ask themselves, 'Where's the bass player?,' it doesn't even occur to
them that there's something missing. With this tour, the mission became how to make a trio be as diverse and varied
as possible, so we started doing live sampling -- singing with oneself, just trying to, you know, break up the fuckin'
monotony of an acoustic guitar all night.
Andrew [Gilchrist] was doing sound for the tour; he had a little 30-second sampler out in the house, and while I
was singing onstage, he would sample my vocal and then start flying it back through the speakers, so my voice
would be doubled, and then I'd start singing with it. So on the tracks you can sometimes hear two of me singing,
but that's not an overdub in the studio, that's live in the theater. And there's a track on the album called "Wrong
with Me" in which I sampled a section of me playing guitar and looped it, and I sampled a couple of other things off
the recordings and flew those in, it's kind of like an introduction, and then it launches into the actual song ["In or
Out"].
Q: Your sense of humor definitely comes across more clearly on this one than on your previous albums.
A: People, since I started recording music, have always had an impression of me that they derived from recordings,
which they see as completely disparate from their impression of me in person, or live, because people have
historically taken a very defensive stance against my little tunes, and they don't really see the humor in them. So
much, in so many songs, for so many years, has been quite tongue-in-cheek, but people haven't always gotten it.
But this album, there's definitely no mistaking that this girl has a problem taking things seriously, including her little
songs as she's performing them. It's a more accurate depiction of me in that sense, too. I've had this ongoing
phenomenon in my life in which people hear the albums and expect some kind of staunch, militant chick to stomp in
and tell all the boys where to get off, and then I walk in with my little hunched shoulders and my goofy little grin,
carrying gear or something, and people think, Where's the chick singer?
I had many moments of epiphany in the studio mixing this album, about how much I like my job. And it's a very
uncool thing, I'm sure; I'm supposed to be some kind of angst-ridden pop culture babe, but it's just not what I'm
about. And I really do like to perform! I mean, touring sucks a lot of the time, but so does anything worthwhile, I
suppose. And to me it's very worthwhile.