Ani DiFranco doesn’t do half-measures. If she’s releasing an album, she’s also starring on Broadway. If she’s writing about abortion rights, she’s zooming out to the metaphysical plane. And if she’s talking about her new producer, she’s describing him like a mad scientist in a spaceship. It’s all part of the package: DiFranco, thirty-plus albums deep, still chasing the next turn.
Right now, she’s pulling off two lives at once. By day (and night) she’s Persephone in Hadestown, working through eight Broadway shows a week. In the mornings and between performances, she’s promoting Unprecedented—a record that sounds like a sharp left turn even for someone who’s spent decades zigging when everyone expected her to zag.
“It does really feel like the first time I’ve had a producer in that deep sense,” she said. “Somebody sitting in the design room with me and thinking all the thoughts, right down to the song order. I didn’t want the buck to stop here for every last choice anymore. I’ve done that dozens of times. I wanted a partner.”
That partner is BJ Burton, best known for his work with Bon Iver and Charli XCX. DiFranco calls him a freak, but it’s said with affection: “He lives in a spaceship surrounded by knobs and dials.” She’d send him bare-bones recordings—sometimes just voice and guitar—and he’d mangle them into sonic landscapes that feel strange, haunted, and occasionally ecstatic. “A lot of these sounds that people think are keyboards or synths are actually my voice or guitar, filtered through BJ’s world. It’s all manipulations of the organic.”
This embrace of machines is new for her. DiFranco has built her empire (and Righteous Babe Records, the label she started in her teens) on live takes, musicians playing instruments, and the raw scrape of her guitar strings. She laughs at her reputation as someone who would rather cut a record on a four-track than spend time chasing plug-ins. But with Unprecedented, she finally cracked that door. “I’ve wanted to explore this world for a long time,” she said. “But I’m not a gearhead. I don’t have all those gizmos. I don’t even know what they’re called. So I needed somebody who could open that door.”
The result is a record that sounds unlike anything in her catalog, yet also completely DiFranco: songs about class and power, spirituality and survival, gender and bodies. It’s not just that Unprecedented is political—it’s that it folds the politics into her cosmic sense of connection.
Take “Baby Roe,” the first single, which lands with the weight of history. Inspired by Josh Prager’s book The Family Roe, the song traces the story of Norma McCorvey (Jane Roe) and the child she carried to term during the Supreme Court fight. “This baby didn’t even know her role in history until she was an adult,” DiFranco said. “She was cornered in a parking lot, told who her mother was and what her life meant. And she remains pro-choice. That just blew my mind.”
The song could have stopped at biography, but DiFranco pushes further, dropping the line that gave one interviewer goosebumps: Life is infinite, in fact. “The interest of a fetus cannot be opposed to its mother,” she said. “They are one. And we are all one. That’s the spiritual truth.”
This is where DiFranco’s politics diverge from bumper-sticker sloganeering. She’s not just angry—though she’s plenty angry—she’s framing the fight through non-duality, through the idea that the lines we draw between self and other, body and body politic, are illusions. “We get so caught up in identity and ego,” she said. “But when we die, we reintegrate. We realize there’s no us and them. It’s all us.”
That argument runs across the record. “New Bible” takes aim at patriarchal control: men should stand down, women should give birth. “The Knowing” pushes at the cage of labels: “You can harness the power of identity without being limited by it,” she said. In DiFranco’s framing, the same structures that once liberated us—naming ourselves, claiming our space—can eventually box us in. “Identity politics were essential,” she said. “But they can also become the prison itself. Use them, but don’t be used by them.”
If this sounds like a heavy sermon, the music keeps it from collapsing under its weight. BJ Burton’s warped manipulations give the songs an alien buoyancy. “These are heavy ideas,” DiFranco laughed. “But you can dance to it.”
And then there’s Hadestown. For DiFranco, this Broadway run is less about the spotlight and more about education. “I got asked to create a theater project myself,” she said. “And I realized—I don’t know anything about musicals. So I thought, let me go learn how it’s done, and when it’s done well. So here I am, a student every night.”
Her relationship to Hadestown goes back a decade and a half, when Anaïs Mitchell mailed her a cassette of a proto-version staged in Vermont. “She wanted to make it into an album,” DiFranco remembered. “So we did, on Righteous Babe. And she didn’t stop there. Ten years later, it’s on Broadway.”
The show’s radical edge appeals to her. “It’s the coolest thing,” she said. “It’s a show anybody can enjoy, but if you want to go deep with it, it’s kind of endless.” The role of Persephone, goddess of spring and reluctant queen of the underworld, feels tailor-made for someone who has spent her career balancing light and dark.
DiFranco signed on for six months—“I’m not sure if I’ll survive,” she joked—and treats each performance as both a gig and a classroom. “I’m learning how the machine runs,” she said. “And it’s blowing my mind.”
This dual life—album and Broadway, protest song and stage spectacle—fits her restless career arc. She was never content to stay in one lane. From the early 90s folk-punk tours with just her guitar to collaborations with Prince and Maceo Parker, from righteous feminist anthems to intimate diary entries, DiFranco has insisted on shapeshifting. Unprecedented is just the latest reminder.
Of course, she’s still watching the politics swirl. “This abortion issue was turned into a political device on purpose,” she said. “It was a strategy, a brainchild. Before that, it wasn’t a left-right thing. Ministers and rabbis were helping women get safe abortions. It was nuanced. It was personal. But it got manipulated into what it is now.”
So when younger pop stars—Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, even Taylor Swift—speak out about reproductive rights, she sees hope. “Amen, brother,” she said. “Speaking to young people, telling them this is your society, this is your power—that’s everything. Voting is the greatest nonviolent revolution we have. If young people show up, they run things. They change things. They can save us.”
For Ani DiFranco, the fight has always been layered: spiritual, political, artistic, personal. She’s still trying to make sense of it all, still trying to turn the chaos into music. “I feel so deeply about having us all step back and take a breath together,” she said. “Recognize ourselves in each other. And then dance to it.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
