The Spirit of Ani
Ani DiFranco and Lauren Coyle Rosen
Akashic Books
In The Spirit of Ani: Reflections on Spirituality, Feminism, Music and Freedom, Ani DiFranco is joined by award-winning author, artist, singer-songwriter, and cultural anthropologist Lauren Coyle Rosen in what amounts to an extended interview.
Rosen opens each chapter with a brief introduction contextualizing the conversation and previewing the themes covered in DiFranco’s responses. Rosen’s questions drive the conversations about DiFranco’s music-writing and art-making processes. She shows particular interest in DiFranco’s “trance-like” state that she enters when writing and performing music.
Though focused mostly on her creative life, DiFranco elaborates on some personal topics covered in her 2019 memoir, No Walls and the Recurring Dream: A Memoir. Stories about her relationship with her deceased father, parenting her two children, and her life in New Orleans appear throughout the book, and DiFranco provides Rosen with personal details and reflections that read as more intimate than in the memoir. The Spirit of Ani is written for fans, by a fan. Rosen’s love of DiFranco’s music colors most of the conversations.
DiFranco provides insight into the context within which many of her songs, older and newer, were written, including “32 Flavors,” “Out of Range,” Everest,” and “Baby Roe.” In particular, she explains how many of her songs from the 1990s were a way for her to establish a shield around herself, to process her vulnerability, and to present herself as more confident than she actually felt at the time.
Overall, Rosen’s fandom serves the book well, as she and DiFranco project a friendly rapport within these candid conversations. In a couple of instances, DiFranco reels in Rosen’s interpretations, grounding them in the realities of writing and performing music for over thirty years. Rosen’s queries about DiFranco’s experiences with spirits, spirituality, transcendence, and apparitions are met with DiFranco’s deflection to a belief in intuition or a shared consciousness among all living things.
Ultimately, the book provides DiFranco another vehicle in which to wrestle with people’s projections onto her versus her true self. The interview-style conversations give her an opportunity to speak in her own voice and clarify her perspective on her life and career as an artist.
A bonus for fans, the book includes eight pages of previously unreleased, color photographs of some of DiFranco’s journal entries, song-birth sheets, paintings, and lyrics. In addition, the final pages provide full lyrics to the twenty-one songs referenced throughout.
While the book also contains an exhaustive list of DiFranco’s albums, videos, and books, she is clearly not done. In the last conversation, Ani DiFranco closes by discussing the power of reciprocity, of “mutual gift-giving,” providing an unspoken promise of more to come from her.
Ani DiFranco • Lauren Coyle Rosen
Featured photo is by Shervin Lainez.
