Unprecedented Sh!t

The 'lil Folksinger in Portland, OR

Friday night’s Ani DiFranco show in Portland at Revolution Hall, for her Unprecedented Sh!t tour is in the books. She still knocks it out of the park. What a treat, and what a long fun road it’s been.

The first time I saw Ani live was 1996 at CB's 313 Gallery in the Bowery. I was out on the road with Ron Sexsmith. We had stopped in NYC for a day for Ron to pick out a new Taylor guitar at the old Sam Ash in Midtown (he plays that same guitar to this day) for his Jones Beach performance the next day. The Gallery was packed out that evening with 20-somethings including me, I got in a big line afterward, said "hello what an awesome show" to her, and that was my first time meeting her.

A year later, Michael Dixon who was Ron's manager found out I was a fan and convinced Ani’s manager Scot Fisher to bring me up to Buffalo from North Carolina to help the fledgling Righteous Babe Records office set up their first real accounting system.

Ani and Scot picked me up at the airport, I dropped my stuff at their house, and we headed to the office. We were driving in one of Ani’s “art cars”, a funky old Toyota I think that was painted all the colors of the rainbow inside and out and had the entire dashboard covered in a papier maché mountain that extended higher than the bottom couple inches of the windshield, festooned with toy army figures, miniature purple dinosaurs, and pretty much every other little knick knack you can imagine. No photo documentation - this was right at the dawn of portable cameras.

After returning to North Carolina, I worked Scot to get a tour management job with her. I had tour managed Cheralee Dillon’s and Bob Wiseman/Don Kerr’s Speed of the Sound of Loneliness tour in Europe in the Spring of ‘94, and completed several tour management stints with Ron Sexsmith including a stadium tour with Sarah McLachlan, so I knew I could do it. My quest stalled out until one day in the Spring of '97 I got the call: "Ani is doing a west coast run next week and we just lost a tour manager, want to do the run with her"? At this point touring with her was just a car and a tour manager/driver. The young, idealistic devil on my shoulder that often rules my world without thinking too hard about the implications spoke up. I looked at Sally on the couch in the other room, due in two weeks with our middle daughter Camille and just prior to what became a career and life move to NYC, and said <start cringe> “um, let me ask I’ll call you back”.

I did not end up tour managing Ani on that run :) Timing is Everything.</end cringe>

Several years later Righteous Babe became my post-Beggars Group digital consultancy Toolshed's third digital marketing / licensing label client, and I headed back to Buffalo. Our first album project together was Evolve. Sean O’Connell from MusicAllies who did radio promo was on that trip as well. We did our first album marketing meeting, and we confirmed a promotional mp3. I proposed starting what back then would have been a very early label newsgroup for fan engagement (it never happened - today these are pretty common via Discord). At the time I didn’t really understand why it didn’t happen, but in years since I’ve come to understand - and agree with - Ani’s perspective on writing music for herself and remembering that when choosing promotional opportunities to grow her footprint just for the sake of doing so.

Our multi-year digital marketing run with RBR included:

• Evolve (2003)

• Educated Guess (2004)

• Knuckle Down (2005)

• Reprieve (2006)

• Red Letter Year (2008)

• ¿Which Side Are You On? (2012)

• Allergic to Water (2014)

• Binary (2017)^[84]

Here’s some of what those years looked like from my chair in the 00’s - an Ani iTunes Session, Ani doing her thing on stage in 2007, and an Ani AOL Session at the famous NYC recording studio The Cutting Room in 2008 - I couldn’t find any photos of Ani running around Austin for Austin City Limits. Tracy Mann ran press, and we tag teamed with her on some of our digital work.

image credit: dick huey, ani @ the cutting room, iTunes Session, Summer 2008 (w/Bruno Ybarra!)

image credit: rtsanderson / wikipedia

image credit: dick huey - ani @ AOL Sessions, NYC, Fall 2007

Without Righteous Babe I’m pretty sure a host of artists that I connect deeply with might never have been on my radar. Toolshed handled digital marketing for all the Righteous Babe releases including early music from Anäis Mitchell (including the original Righteous Babe release of Hadestown, which became a smash on Broadway ten years after the album was released) and Andrew Bird who became a massive success in his own right. And so many others. Bitch and Animal. Hammel on Trial. Utah Phillips.

image credit: dick huey, ani with pete seeger, Nyack, NY, January 18, 2008 - she lost her voice during this show!

image credit: dick huey, early performance of Hadestown w/Anäis Mitchell at Rockwood Music Hall

My daughers arrived in my early 30’s, and my living situation as a dad raising three girls with my wife Sally on a farm in the Hudson Valley was still pretty different from…pretty much everyone I worked with professionally. Basically none of my music industry colleagues had kids at that point, and the same thing for the musicians we worked with. Ani had her first child in 2007, and that became more of a common frame of reference for us both than digital music and marketing was at that time.

My third trip to Buffalo happened in the Spring of 2006, during the time that Ani and Scot had embarked on a reported $5m project to rescue an abandoned church and convert it to a performance venue and label offices in downtown Buffalo. Scot and label manager Mary Begley took us around and showed us the build before we met to talk about digital marketing for Ani’s next album Reprieve. The scale of the church commitment completely blew me away. They had a *long* way to go, but what was running through my head was a new understanding of committing to your hometown and putting your money where your mouth is.

image credit(s) - dick huey, April 2006, The Church/RBR HQ, Buffalo, NY

Toolshed stayed involved with digital and social marketing for Righteous Babe, and for Ani, through our final project with her, the Vote Dammit! marketing project in 2016 around the song Play God, on the heels of the Binary release. In fact, Ani was our last artist marketing project at Toolshed before we switched up to working with music tech firms providing income optimization technology to labels and distributors. I left the image below up on our website for three years…I just couldn’t take it down (not just because it was the end of an era for me, but also because of DT mining anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ sentiment).

In the summer of 2024 on a NYC trip I saw Ani in her finals weeks as Persephone in Hadestown (she sang Persephone’s part on the original Hadestown release), and also for the premier of 1-800-ON-HER-OWN, Dana Flor’s documentary film about the early days of Ani, Scot, Mary Begley, Anna Kapechuk, Ron Ehmke, dear departed Susan Tanner, and Righteous Babe. Seeing the old images of the frosted glass office door with the Righteous Babe logo on it took me back. I heard about all of this happening on Ani’s Patreon artist subscription (note: her Patreon was a realization of my 00’s marketing pitch for an unreleased music subscription plan - once again, Timing is Everything)

What exactly is it about Ani’s music that’s drawn me in over the years? Her messages of empowerment, being pro-choice, speaking your mind but also listening, and taking a stand. But it was also her choice to stay independent and release music on her own independent label, and the artistic growth cadence that offered, that rang true. Credit to her current management Peter and Steve from Invasion Group for their part in keeping the wheels on the bus pointed in a sustainable independent direction. These lines from Face Up and Sing off her fifth studio album Out Of Range, which was the album that she was touring that first time I saw her at CB’s Gallery in ‘96, pulled me in:

… It's nice that you listen
It'd be nicer if you joined in
As long as you play their game girl
You're never going to win…

Ani was a live reality check for me to take positions in independent music, speak up, and defend them. In music, I was an early evangelist for user-centric streaming distribution, which my friend Sharky Laguana from the band Creeper Lagoon popularized with his viral piece How To Make Streaming Royalities Fair(er). I joined the Future of Music Coalition, and ran it for a time, in a nod to my early roots as an artist manager focused on bread and butter issues like artist health care. Today I volunteer time for the board of MusicPortland, which works to contextualize the value of music to the Portland, Oregon economy, and also works to build opportunity for independent musicians touring in the greater Cascadia / PNW region.

Last night’s Ani show included her performing You Forgot To Speak off her most recent Unprecedented Sh!t, and it made me think back to Face Up and Sing:

You know the flood is coming
So you watch the sky for weeks
And you see a bird pass overhead
With something in its beak
And nobody will listen
But then, you forgot to speak

How the hell can anyone listen when you forget to speak?

---

Music is a part of every day for me. I never don’t have a song running through my head, including in the middle of the night when I wake up. I’ll leave you with a recent listen of an oldie but a goodie. This song has been bouncing back into my head for weeks. I’m a huge James Hall fan from my time living in the South (do yourself a favor and listen to his album Pleasure Club if you never have), and his more recent band Pleasure Club hits all the right notes. Careful though, this song is an earworm.

James Hall w/Pleasure Club

Until next….thanks for reading,

@dh