Independent spirits Getting to the roots of Ani DiFranco's Knuckle Down, plus Jolie Holland comes to Boston BY MATT ASHARE

There’s never really been much question about Ani DiFranco’s integrity as an artist. From her earliest days as a punked-up folkie with an acoustic guitar, combat boots, day-glo hair, and an ambiguous sexuality through her experimentations with jam-band groovathons and jazzy improvisations, and right back to her heralded recent return to the girl-with-a-guitar singer-songwriter fold, she’s maintained a level of independence that’s almost unheard of in the music business. More important, DiFranco has made a point of creating new challenges for herself every step of the way, both in her music and through her Righteous Babe record label, which has grown from being a way for her to release her own music to becoming home to an eclectic roster of unusual artists, only some of whom share her folk-punk style.

So it comes as a minor shock to see the name of another strong-willed singer-songwriter — Joe Henry — alongside DiFranco’s in the production credits for her new Knuckle Down (Righteous Babe). It marks the first time that DiFranco has relinquished such a large degree of independence in a major creative endeavor. And yet, seen through the lens of DiFranco’s obvious need to create new challenges for herself in her work, Henry’s presence makes sense. He is on the surface the antithesis of DiFranco — a soft-spoken, easy-going, roots-rock traditionalist to her strong-willed, high-strung iconoclast. Henry, who records for Epitaph’s Anti- imprint, is a songwriter’s songwriter, a student of the craft who doesn’t show his hand so much as his handiwork. DiFranco is more a creature of instinct, an artist who lays her emotional cards on the table and lets ’em ride. What they share is a work ethic. "Those of us who have parents who are workers learn how to work," is how DiFranco puts it when I catch her at home in Buffalo, just a few days before she heads out on the tour that’ll bring her to the Orpheum on April 29. "I got pretty lucky on that front."

As DiFranco describes it, she found a soul mate in that regard in Henry when she invited him to open a couple of shows for her about a year ago. "We have synergistic personalities, so we became fast friends. We’d hang out after shows, drink wine, and talk about music. And one of the things we talked a lot about was making records. And we found out that we had really similar sensibilities. So I took that as a sign that it was time for me to come out of the self-imposed solitude I’d been in for a few years. I mean, I’ve collaborated with many different people in the past, but this is the first time I’ve had someone quote unquote ‘producing.’ "

At first, Knuckle Down shows few signs of Henry’s involvement: the disc-opening title track begins with just Ani playing fast and furious on acoustic guitar, letting out a torrential downpour of stream-of-consciousness poetry in a breathless, playful voice that latches onto random syllables and pulls them apart in a fractured falsetto: "That’s just my cowgirl alter ego/Riding on her bar-room bull/Dripping with the sweat of irony/As the cowboys whoop and drool." No signs here of Henry’s country comfort or rootsy flavorings — "Knuckle Down" is pure, undiluted DiFranco. But it isn’t long before the pace slows and some of Henry’s sonic sensibilities begin to shade the sound of the album. Violin and slow-picked acoustic guitar frame a more reflective DiFranco on the second track, "Studying Stones." "There’s never been an endeavor so strange/As trying to slow the blood in my veins/To keep my face blank/As a stone that just sank/Until not a ripple remains," she sings, and you have to wonder whether the struggle she’s describing might reflect the creative friction that results when the sensibility of an Ani DiFranco and a Joe Henry rub up against each other.

But as Knuckle Down unfolds, a certain synergy does begin to take shape. Henry and his team of backing musicians and engineers add tasteful rootsy touches to songs that are built around DiFranco’s acoustic guitar, and DiFranco tailors her lyrics and delivery to make room for Henry’s embellishments without ironing out any of her trademark idiosyncrasies. "Sunday Morning" is a simple, sensual rumination on a warm weekend day spent in bed with a lover, "Both of us reading and looking up occasionally . . . sheets still warm, kitties swarming, around our feet." The song is a custom fit for the kind of restrained atmospheric instrumental embellishments that are a Joe Henry staple, and for a string-bending guitar solo that never strays too far from the vocal melody. This isn’t Ani DiFranco’s country album, but it does find her roaming freely and quite comfortably through rootsy terrain. And it features some of her most polished lyrics and economical songwriting. It’s clear she took Henry’s æsthetic into account when she wrote the album, and that she’s risen to the challenge of impressing a fellow songwriter, even if she’s not the kind of person who’d make such a boast.

"I’m not sure what I expected when I asked Joe to co-produce the album," she admits, "but as it turns out, Joe was a producer in sort of the old-fashioned sense. Prior to the recording sessions, he was the one making the phone calls, crunching the numbers, and bringing in the musicians and engineers, mostly from the dream team he’s assembled out in LA. It felt like the old time Motown days when the producer would put together the band and the artist would come in and they would make a record. But when we got into studio, I sort of took over my half of the co-producing. I worked with the band on arrangements."

DiFranco’s collaboration with Henry came at the right time in her evolution. Although she did begin her career with a guitar and her voice, she had been exploring jazzy grooves with horn arrangements in songs that played down the central role of the guitar. Now, as she prepares to go on the road with her guitar and just one back-up musician, DiFranco’s æsthetic appears to have come full circle. "Oh, yeah, I was the one saying, ‘Let’s turn the guitar up.’ I’m once again in a space where I feel that the songs live in the guitar, and in the past, there was a time when I downplayed that."

Despite her return to the guitar, she didn’t write any songs with Henry, and his role in the recording wasn’t exactly what she had expected. "When I invited Joe and envisioned this whole new concept of co-producing, I think I was expecting more of a creative-collaboration-in-the-minute type thing," she says, reaching for a way to describe their working relationship. "But, ah, well, we would record a take of a song and there would just be silence. Then we’d do a couple more, and I’d walk into the booth and say, ‘I like take three. . . .’ And we’d go with that. I guess that when I go into the studio to make a record, it’s bound to come out sounding like my record, even if there’s a new team assembled to record with. But the sound of the record has a lot to do with the creative exchange between me and the band and then the engineer and the mixer, who were all Joe’s people. And they have a signature way of recording, especially the drums — all of those big, dark, mysterious compressed drum sounds. And the film noir kind of piano. So I came in with my music and sensibility, and they had theirs, and we met in the middle."

The biggest challenge for DiFranco seems to have been relocating to LA to make the album and then sticking to the schedule that Henry had plotted. "Making a record in six days, which not only meant nailing them to tape but also teaching them to the band, wasn’t easy. And I also wasn’t used to going home every day at a terribly decent hour." She laughs. "So maybe if we did it again, I’d insist we work more on the chick singer’s schedule."

IF HENRY IS INTERESTED in another production project with a female singer-songwriter, he need look no farther than the Anti- roster, where he’ll find an up-and-coming artist with deep roots in noirish blues, a fondness for dark-textured recordings, and a promising new album titled Escondida. Her name is Jolie Holland, and she’s playing T.T. the Bear’s Place this Sunday. "Anti- were looking to sign a female artist, and they heard my first album," the 29-year-old Holland recounts when I catch her on her cell phone in a van as she makes her way to Nashville on tour. "So I became the first girl on the same label as Nick Cave and Tom Waits and all those other people." Indeed, there’s a gothic, cabaret sensibility that parallels Cave’s in the jazzy arrangement of "Mad Tom of Bedlam," a traditional British folk song Holland recorded for Escondida, and a taste of Waits in the broken blues of "Old Fashion Morphine," a song Holland says is inspired by two old gospel songs she found, "Old Time Religion" and "Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning."

Holland is a relatively recent convert to old-time jazz and blues, but you can tell she’s been a quick study. "It wasn’t until 1996 that I hit the road and met a lot of people who were listening to older music. That was a big year. I heard Nick Drake, Elizabeth Cotten, Blind Willie McTell, Mississippi John Hurt, Neil Young. I heard Clarence Ashley for the first time that year, and I got into American music really deeply. And a lot of the stuff that I’m into goes back to the 1800s."

That may seem far-fetched, but one of the tunes on Escondida, "Faded Coat of Blue," dates back to the American Civil War. "It’s a song from the 1860s that a friend of mine sent it to me on a mix tape. I don’t know who wrote it. It’s just a traditional song mourning the loss of family member to the Civil War."

Holland, who tours with a drummer and a guitar player, claims to be a musical neophyte. But she’s blessed with an instinctive feel for jazzy vocal intonations and an adventurous sensibility when it comes to instrumentation: she recently picked up a three-string cigar-box guitar that’s become an integral part of her show, along with the guitar and the violin that she plays live. There’s nothing studied about her approach to the roots music she’s developed an affinity for. And if she has any concept of how unusual her musical æsthetic is, it’s only in the broadest sense. "I’ve always been conscious about trying to make a niche for myself as a writer and to make sure what I’m doing has some value. So in that sense, I guess I knew that what I was doing was unusual when I started playing this music."

Jolie Holland performs this Sunday, February 6, at T.T. the Bear’s Place, 10 Brookline Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts's Central Square; call (617) 492-BEAR. Ani DiFranco plays the Orpheum, 1 Hamilton Place in Boston, on April 29; call (617) 931-2000.