‘Song Diving’ Episode 9: The Spirit of Ani DiFranco

For more than three decades, Ani DiFranco has built one of the most distinctive songwriting catalogs in modern folk music. She blends poetry, politics, and personal reflection across dozens of fiercely independent releases. Her new book, The Spirit of Ani, was created in conversation with writer and cultural anthropologist Lauren Coyle Rosen. It explores the deeper forces behind that work: creativity, spirituality, and the evolving consciousness that has shaped her music and art.

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Known for writing songs that feel both deeply personal and socially aware, DiFranco has long approached songwriting as a way of translating feeling into language. The book weaves together reflections on songwriting and culture with photographs, journal entries, artwork, and lyrics from across DiFranco’s career. When DiFranco joined me on the Song Diving podcast, our conversation moved from the ideas in the book to the ways songs arrive, evolve, and sometimes take years to reveal their meaning.

Dean Fields: In The Spirit of Ani, you talk about how many of your songs start with a feeling more than anything else. Can you talk to us about what that process looks like?

Ani DiFranco: “Yeah, I try to talk about it a little in that book, but it’s sort of ironic for me because ‘talk about the feeling,’ like that’s exactly the impossibility of it. Right?

And yet that is the work of songwriting for me. It’s attaching words which are so basic and clunky and reductive to a thing that is so fluid and alive and is just a resonance, you know. It’s a feeling, it’s a frequency, it’s a vibration.

And you’re trying to break it down to stats, you know, the words, the sort of math of it. What’s the definition of that fluctuating, evolving force that you can sense in the world and in yourself resonating in yourself?

So it’s hard to do. And I think when a poem or a song works, it’s because you’ve somehow brought words to it just enough, not too much, so it’s all fixed in this box of language, which, again, is not nearly as vast as the things that it talks about.

So I think if you can bring the words in in a way that leaves room for that energy to keep humming around them and through them, then you know that’s already pushing outside of the boundaries of the words and can indicate so much more.”

Dean Fields: You also talk in the book about how songs sometimes catch up with life later. Can you expand on that?

Ani DiFranco: “Well, I mean, I have the desire right now to talk about a song that’s not mine. ‘Why We Build the Wall,’ Anaïs Mitchell’s song that’s embedded in the musical Hadestown.

Hades sings this song talking about why you build the wall, basically why you preference some human beings over the other and why you keep those people out because you’re keeping all your stuff for yourself and yours.

This is a song that was written long before 2016 and the election of Donald Trump the first time. Anaïs brought it to me years before. I think it was a thirteen-year process for that musical to hit Broadway and reach mainstream America. And yet that happened. Trump has now been elected. Hadestown hits the Broadway stage, and there’s the perfect song to speak to this political moment.

So the songwriter has to be a dozen years ahead of the game.

I have found that example many times in my life and my song making. And that has factored into me being more patient as well now that I’m older. Because if something is slowing down the process, or if it takes a long time to get from here to there, there’s a reason for that. Don’t disrespect the universe and the spirits and how it’s all working together.”

Dean Fields: Your albums, especially the earlier ones, always gave me a sense of movement. Another place, another idea. Another cause to shed light on. Did it feel that way to you?

Ani DiFranco: “I mean, I think that I was always in conversation with spirit, and I think I was a good partner back in the day because I was inexhaustible. I would just never stop. I never slept, I never put it down. It was always on to the next song and the next thing to express and the next poem and the next idea.

So in that sense, I was very available. I made myself very available to spirit.”

Dean Fields: You mentioned three things that stood out to me: learning patience with creativity, collaborating with spirit, and not leaning on memory. Can you talk a little more about how those ideas show up in your work now?

Ani DiFranco: “I am more aware now at 55 than I certainly was at 25 that any act of creation, the making of a song, is a collaboration with spirit.

I’m not focusing on the life of Ani and the literal experiences I’ve lived and how to turn those fluid, expansive things into verses and choruses.

I’m more focusing on ‘Tell me, give me what it is I’m supposed to share.’ Let me just be as open as possible.”

DiFranco explores many of these ideas in greater depth throughout The Spirit of Ani. She reflects on creativity, consciousness, and the forces that shape a life in art. In our full conversation on the Song Diving podcast, she also dives deeper into the songs that shaped her writing and the music that continues to influence her. You can hear the entire interview wherever you get your podcasts.

Photo by Shervin Lainez