by Holly Huffstutler

Created on: January 21, 2010

Love and climate change are two prominent concepts on Ani DiFranco’s mind of late, judging by the lyrics off her new album “Red Letter Year”

           

“Red Letter Year” took two years to record, an unusually long time for the folk singer who famously started her own record label, Righteous Babe Records. But in her eyes that extra time accounts for the precision of this album which shows more joyful, and in her words a “more relaxed me”

Though that added joy isn’t hindering her from being able to weave undeniable political statements in song form with the love songs “Smiling Underneath,” “Way Tight,” “Round a Pole,” and “Star Matter” as well as her ode to her new baby girl “Present/Infant” The other side of her lyrical card is that she works in messages of heightened personal contentment and analysis with her more political songs until the whole album becomes a sweet mix of bliss and criticism sung in her unique rough yet distinctively  clear tones.

The first track off the album, “Red Letter Year” contains ruminations on New Orleans’s destruction at the active hands of Hurricane Katrina and the passive gaze of “a man with a monkey for a face…flying over in a helicopter whistling Dixie and playing dumb”

           

“Present/Infant,” the third track, is a delicate, uplifting tune that  shows Difranco looking at her daughter, seeing the love all around her and talking her self out of “glaring   into mirrors” and focusing on perceived imperfections.

“Good Luck” is the most musically alluring of all the tracks. On top of it being lyrically ambiguous the song has a strange quirk.  During the chorus when she sings the lyrics “you’re an avalanche of detour signs falling of a truck,” she builds pressure on the first half of the line and then pulls back in vocal volume and intensity of instrumentation, the accompanying tings of discordant guitar and cymbals making the retreat sound eerie and yet sensual. 

“Landing gear” clearly addresses the effects of climate change more than the other songs. The tune on the verse is mostly made of ascending scales, which she mirrors in a more moderate fashion in the chorus. The words those scales are set to first peer inside the head of a oft used symbol of the negative effects of global warming, the “drowning polar bear swimming around looking for a ride and its so God  awful hot outside”

Of the many love songs, none is more down to earth than “Smiling Underneath.” The tune begins with an aggressive ticking sound that slightly tapers off  when the infectious happiness of the song manifests itself in lyrics that assert that she would still be “smiling underneath” even if they were “stuck in traffic for over a week with a car of quintuplets who are all cutting teeth.”  

Learn more about this author, Holly Huffstutler.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.