Feminist icon, Grammy winner, Broadway star, best-selling memoirist, and children’s book author Ani DiFranco is the mother of the DIY movement, being one of the first artists to create her own label in 1990 (the aptly named Righteous Babe Records). While she has been known as the “Little Folksinger,” her music has embraced punk, funk, hip hop, jazz, soul, electronica, and even more distant sounds. Unprecedented Sh!t, released in May 2024, is her 23rd album.

About the Artist:
Ani DiFranco has been known as a feminist icon and pioneer of DIY for nearly 35 years. Since founding her record label, Righteous Babe Records, in 1990, she has released 22 albums, traversing folk, punk, hip-hop, soul, and electronic genres and addressing a range of autobiographical, political, and social issues. While her first four albums — Ani DiFranco (1990), Not So Soft (1991), Imperfectly (1992), and Puddle Dive (1993) — harnessed a more raw sound, Out Of Range (1994), Not A Pretty Girl (1995) and Dilate (1996) were more rooted in DiFranco’s folk ethos. She released eight more albums over the next 10 years, earning a Grammy Award for her 2003 album Evolve and numerous nominations. Her most recent albums include 2008’s Red Letter Year and 2017’s Binary. Most recently, fans have been thrilled by 2021’s Revolutionary Love and the 25th Anniversary Edition reissues of both her iconic 1997 live album Living In Clip and 1998’s Little Plastic Castle, via Righteous Babe Records in 2023.

DiFranco is also a poet, author, and Broadway performer. She released a collection of poems and paintings titled Verses in 2007. Her memoir No Walls and the Recurring Dream was a New York Times Top 10 best seller in 2019, and her children’s books The Knowing and Show Up and Vote are out now. DiFranco also recently completed a 5-month run on Broadway as ‘Persephone’ in the Tony- and Grammy Award-winning Best Musical, Hadestown.

Photo: Anthony Mulcahy