Ani DiFranco
Knuckle Down
Righteous Babe

Seventeen albums into her career, and a mere 34 years old, Ani DiFranco is assured a place of honor in the history of popular music, and it has less to do with the self-created commercial freedom, the political activism that finds expression in her art or her keenly felt lyrics than it does with the guitar. It's really all about the guitar and what DiFranco does with it. With her dizzying array of tunings and her ability to coax myriad shadings from its strings, DiFranco is a true virtuoso. Her guitar can complain. It can mollify, coax, soothe, spit venom. It can careen restlessly through a song like a child emerging from school after an endlessly boring day. The rest of her virtues are relevant only as long as she continues to play like she does.

Knuckle Down, DiFranco's latest, is a rare offering for her in that the rest of the music meets the level of her guitar work. It's a beautifully produced album, textured and performed with such energy that her least satisfying lyrics (and the lyrics are usually the main problem on a DiFranco album) are muted. The album's preoccupations — the vagaries of love, the consideration of family and roots, and the need to temper your dreams of bliss in the face of steep odds — have been gone over with more depth elsewhere, but DiFranco makes a strong case, with her heart on her sleeve and the calluses on her writing fingers ballooning.

"Manhole," one of the disc's best tracks, takes a hard look at DiFranco's recent divorce. She chronicles it with a fried-vocal-cord delivery and an insistent, spinning lead guitar line:

And maybe it was I who betrayed his majesty/ with no opposite reality/ like a puddle with no reflection/ of the sky or the trees./ But after my dread beheading I tied that sucker back on with a string/ and I guess I'm pretty different now/ considering.

DiFranco faithfuls see a lyric like "sucker back on with a string" and know at once that the singer has steeped the words in passion, anger, triumph and performance bravado. Other singers just cannot do this, and default to the melancholy understatement of a Nick Drake, approaching the mic in the studio with their eyes cast downward. DiFranco will never sound like she's apologizing when she sings.

It might be nice if she more frequently wrote lyrics as direct as her singing and playing. This is dicey territory to enter: DiFranco's fans have cast her in golden light. They respond to the idea of her lyrics as revelatory and self-lacerating. In fact, tagging DiFranco as a brutally confessional lyricist is a given in news pieces in the same way that "liberal media" has now achieved an imprimatur in political discussion. It doesn't matter whether it's true; it's been repeated over and over, so that, in effect, settles the matter.

DiFranco often does get right to the point; over the liquid groove of "Modulation," she sings:

In order to/ say thank you to you/ I must do it intentionally./ But tonight with every breath/ I can feel my death/ sure as I can feel my knees.

Still, DiFranco is more comfortable puzzling every angle of the problem at the heart of a song than she is confronting it. I have a good friend who loves to get into deep and involved conversations, but he doesn't realize how he kills them when he opens his mouth. Say the conversation is on tort reform; he will start talking about what it is, then segue into the Republican view, offering praise and disdain, then into the Democrat view, and more praise and disdain, then offer responses to arguments none of us has given, as though we had given them, but we cannot give them, because he speaks with commas and dashes, there are no periods, and he goes on like this for a very long time. And during his harangue, people drop out of the conversation — mini-conversations on other topics begin, eyes glaze over. By the time he's done, there's nothing to talk about, because he's not only discussed tort reform, but he's also discussed the discussion of tort reform.

This is DiFranco's dilemma: she puzzles her life from every angle, and there is no simple mystery in the body of many of her songs. There's no in for the listener because she's done her work and your work and your three closest friends' work for you. One suspects that she means to communicate honesty and thorough appraisal, but it's actually just confusing, and it distracts from her beautiful music. Is it wrong to want to be a part of the argument in DiFranco's songs? To be allowed to be confused with her?

Still, Knuckle Down is an album so musically profound that, if someone less ubiquitous than DiFranco released it, the lines at the local Coconuts would swell with buyers. (Why is there a silent undermining of artists who create constantly?) It's amazing there hasn't been more noise made about the expansive and rich production of the disc, which makes use of overlaid guitar tracks, strings and even Andrew Bird whistling, to suggest space and expansiveness. Even the most intimately constructed song is airy and open, and thus alive, as though she and her band are playing for you alone at Red Rocks. Credit is due to DiFranco for sharing production duties with Joe Henry; together, they give her guitar work its finest representation on disc. Here is where the complex and panoptic DiFranco achieves a marriage of thought and expression, for even when her guitar twirls off into a funk riff, or when she pounds a chord progression into powder in a song's furious bridge, she always comes back to the melody. Her guitar can abandon the melody to consider one of her dilemmas in myriad ways because, frankly, her writing isn't as good as her playing. But whose is? DiFranco will never go the Lennon-Ono minimalist route, nor should she, but killing a few of her darlings couldn't hurt.

— Christopher Hickman (hickatz at mindspring dot com)