There's also Difranco the feminist rabble-rouser and yearning romantic, the live-and-let-live Everywoman and the solitary outsider, the in-your-face rocker and the introspective folk singer.
to kill somebody," she says by way of introduction to "Out of Range," one of 32 scoops (31 tracks and the obligatory "hidden" track) of prime Difranco on the live double-CD "Living in Clip." Independence? On "Not So Soft," she declares, "I always wanted to be commander in chief of my own one-woman army." Noble ambition? On "I'm No Heroine," she offers a mission statement: "I just write about what I should've done/I sing what I wish I could say/And I hope somewhere, some woman hears my music/And it helps her through her day."
On eight previous studio albums, thin production has turned some of that flavorful complexity to vanilla. Those releases documented the songs but not the singer, the ideas but not the shades of emotion that ignited and sustained them. On the road, Difranco fills the room not just with songs that she reinterprets almost nightly but with a personality that's spiked with offbeat confessions, self-deprecating humor and loopy wisdom.
Which is why "Living in Clip" defies the clich'e9 - it's the rare live album that is more than just a respite between songwriting binges. The CD has four new songs, including a brisk, bracing tale of romantic conflict called "Gravel." But more significantly, it puts the oldies in a context in which both initiates and nonbelievers can understand why Difranco is rightly regarded by many as one of the decade's defining voices. Many of her best-known songs are reconfigured with the help of drummer Andy Stochansky and bassist Sara Lee, and despite a couple of missteps - notably a turgid "Amazing Grace" done with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra - these versions blow away the studio originals.
Difranco brings a jazz singer's elastic phrasing to her songs, and this enables her to shape and reshape them like a punk Cassandra Wilson. Though at times Difranco indulges in bring-down-the-rafters wailing that recalls the excesses of Melissa Etheridge, she also has developed a nuanced vocabulary that shifts in a blink from boho rap to bedroom whisper, wordless moan to feral roar.
On "The Diner," Difranco communicates her mounting anxiety about a romance with chantlike heavy breathing, in tandem with Stochansky. On "Willing to Fight," she chokes on the syllables as she rages against passive acceptance of injustic
