In 1998, singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco released her ninth studio album, Little Plastic Castle. It would become her highest-charting release to date, and earned her a “Best Female Rock Vocal Performance” Grammy award nomination for the track “Glass House.” Though she has since released a dozen more studio albums—most recently in 2021 with Revolutionary Love—Little Plastic Castle has remained a cornerstone of her career. So, to mark its 25th anniversary, she is releasing a remastered version, with bonus tracks, on June 23 via her own Righteous Babe Records. This is also the first time it will be available on vinyl.
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Calling from her New Orleans home, DiFranco explains that this reissue came about because of a pragmatic concern: “It occurred to us over at Righteous Babe [Records] that all of these records I’ve made—some of which are thirty years old now—are on all these formats that are deteriorating in a filing cabinet somewhere, and some of the formats have become obsolete,” she tells American Songwriter, “so it occurred to us, ‘Boy, we’d better digitize what master tapes we have before they’re lost to entropy.’”
As that restoration work progressed, she says, “We thought, ‘Well, while we’re at it, let’s revisit the mastering. And while we’re at it uncovering these tapes, maybe there are some bonus tracks and things that.”
At the same time, DiFranco didn’t want to include a slew of bonus tracks—there are three on this reissue—because she was wary of messing with her original vision for Little Plastic Castle. “In terms of putting on a whole new piece [of music], I just didn’t want to change the structure of the record as I originally conceived of it and put it out there. I didn’t want to add something that I thought better of adding at the time,” she says.
Looking back on how she originally created this album, DiFranco recalls that “The songs were certainly coming fast and furious at the time. I think my [songwriting] process was just to run to try to catch up with all the things that were spilling out of me, and all of the things that I needed to get off my chest and process with my guitar. My guitar was very much my bosom buddy, my companion, through that whole roller coaster of that era.
“There was sort of an exponential leap [in my career] that happened in the late ’90s, and Little Plastic Castle is very much about that,” she continues. “It’s about suddenly being famous, I guess you could say, and all of the things that come with it.”
She thinks this hadn’t happened with her previous studio albums (starting with her 1990 self-titled debut) because the mainstream culture hadn’t quite been ready for her forthright alternative folk-rock style. “The feminism in my songs, the content of my songs, it scared a lot of people away,” she says. “I got [called] a lot of, ‘Angry lesbian, man-hater, militant, puppy eater!’ The dominant culture was wary, to say the least.”
This mistrust, she believes, came about “because I was sort of a harbinger in the culture of inclusion of women—I maybe broke some ground in a way that was important at the time or gave voice to things that were so ubiquitous in the lives of women, but you just didn’t hear it in songs that are on a radio or a TV. I mean, this is a time period when you had ‘Women’s Music’ sections in record stores, way in the back corner. I think when I started pushing my songs at the world, there was a great need for that space to open up for women’s stories.”
DiFranco can pinpoint exactly why her approach suddenly started attracting favorable attention during the late ’90s. “Living in Clip was a double live album that I put out [in 1997] just before Little Plastic Castle, and this was a real turning point for me,” she says. As a live album, it put her in a different context, “where you could hear not just the songs and those scary feminist messages and stories, this full frontal style of singing or guitar playing, but you could [also] hear the person behind it. I think that allowed a lot of people a way into my music, like, ‘Oh, OK, she’s not going to hurt me; [she’s] kind of goofy. I think I’m safe. I think I might even try going to a show.’”
Despite DiFranco’s anti-mainstream style and approach, she had always seemed destined to become a successful musician because of her upbringing in Buffalo, New York, where she became active within the local music scene when she was still in elementary school.
“I was hanging out with songwriters from when I was a little kid,” she recalls. One of them was particularly important; she describes him as “a real intellectual, but also alcoholic, barfly troubadour living girlfriend to girlfriend singer-songwriter artist. I met him when I was a child at this guitar store where I got my first guitar, and I became his sidekick. He would promote singer-songwriter shows around Buffalo. He started what he called the Greenwich Village Song Project, and he would bring songwriters from New York to Buffalo.”
At only nine years old, DiFranco attended those shows and discovered artists, such as the singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega, and many of them then became her musical mentors and personal friends. “All these singer-songwriters from Buffalo and from New York, that was my world, so I think I got a very strong early [musical] education,” she says.
Now in her fifties, DiFranco is still excited about what she can discover through music. “For me, it’s just continuing the adventuring—pushing always further and deeper into the world, and then that leads you into yourself more, to places you hadn’t been before,” she says. “Being a part of the world and engaging with it and trying to be accountable to it and trying to really connect with people and maybe help somebody or myself—this is what inspires me. So if I continue to show up for that work and that process and that adventure, then the songs keep coming.”
Courtesy All Eyes Media
