Ani DiFranco - Living in Clip

Chris Parisi

She's crammed several years worth of live performances into these two CDs. Most of these songs are performed by only three people: Andy Stochansky on drums, Sara Lee on bass, and DiFranco on acoustic guitar (although her trio is joined a couple of times by Doc Severinsen's Buffalo Philharmonic orchestra). Her concert performances have long been as much a part of her low-profile legend as her self-financed studio albums. When this live set came out in 1997, a number of critics remarked that it captured the energy of that relationship better than the albums she recorded in the isolation of the studio. That it does. DiFranco's public exhibition of emotion, and her self-deprecating banter in between songs, add to the feeling of openness that is essential to her music (essential both because she is an activist for the politics of honesty and because her personal vulnerability is necessary to keep those politics from seeming pedantic). What these recordings cannot do is transcend their own medium, they are still, after all, recordings. Ultimately, many of her studio performances make for better CDs simply because they were designed with CD players in mind. On her studio albums, the music is often more focused, the sound quality is better, and DiFranco conveys her emotions without any reliance on visual communication. Still, Living in Clip is a good document of DiFranco's relationship with her audience. Darryl Cater

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