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| June 11, 2001 |
Revelling/Reckoning
Ani DiFranco
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What all of my recent Ani listening has been leading up to. First of all, the CDs in this double album are packaged so beautifully the album becomes an art object in its own right. The first CD is more upbeat and contains most of the songs that grabbed me on my initial listen. The guitarwork at the beginning of "Garden of Simple" is beautiful, and the song itself tells of the struggle artists and those who love them go through every day as they try to reconcile their desire to do art with the demands of a world where we must make money to eat and survive. I think of my boyfriend every time I hear it, and my heart aches. Probably my favorite on the whole album is "Marrow", where the whole song builds to a wrenching climax and then just winds up. The second CD contains more introspective stuff like "Grey", where Ani grapples with maintaining a relationship once the euphoria of first love and discovery has worn off. Without trying too hard to figure out what's been going on in her own life that she can write such songs about love, the relationship songs on here are solid and show a woman struggling with the complexity of her feelings. It feels real. Her politics are still fully present as well, like on "Subdivision" where she sings about the first time she saw a homeless person lying in the street. Not easy stuff. At the end of it all she caps the album with "In Here", an unabashed love song that I'd like to believe she's singing to her husband. "Even when I look right at you/ I always just see through/ And I always just see new things/ To admire about you"
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