There’s a musical force to be reckoned with heading for Fredericton. Singer-songwriter, outspoken feminist and activist Ani DiFranco will be performing at The Playhouse in Fredericton on Wednesday, Nov. 10. She graciously gave me some of her time to answer questions on politics, the long road travelled and her music.

BronweN: Red Letter Year is much more peaceful than your previous recordings. Ani: My husband marked a beginning of a new era for me and then we had a kid, so now of course the whole family vibe has just brought a lot of peace and balance into my life that didn’t used to be there. So now it makes it even better to sing the overtly political shit too, cause I think when somebody has a sense of balance behind their voice, it’s easier for people to ingest the political opinions and messages.

BronweN: You’re one of the few singers out there who is always looking at the political landscape for inspiration. Do you think that Obama has been an effective president so far?

Ani: Well, I mean, not as effective as a lot of us were hoping, but it’s hard to gauge. I tend to try not to put all of that on his shoulders just because if you step back and look at what he’s up against it’s just literally insane.

BronweN: Okay, so if you could put one item on Obama’s agenda, what would that be what you’d ask him to do?

Ani: I think that also forefront in my mind is this ‘green revolution’ that he and so many others have given lip service to. I think that we need to start acting on it. The rest of the world is gonna dust us in terms of sustainable technology and we’re gonna be purchasing it from them, and meanwhile just sort of plowing dumbly forth on this path to destruction. I live down in New Orleans now and for weeks on end; the smell of burning oil is in the background of our everyday life. The atmosphere of impending doom is inescapable. So (the environment is) really in the forefront of my consciousness because of where I live and just because of the fact that I’m just so aware now that I’m surrounded by a very unsustainable culture, society.

BronweN: Can we expect a smell of burning oil on your next album?

Ani: Yeah, you sure can. This album that I’m just about done with - just wrapping up the final mixes and there’s a lot of political songs. I think that just being on stable ground in my personal life allows me now to look outward even more and so there’s some pretty hard core shit on this new record - I’ve been challenging myself to be even more candid.

BronweN: You began a career of creating community over 20 years ago. What would you change if you could go back and do it all again?

Ani: I tout imperfection for my own good because when I look back at say, my recorded canon for instance, I have a lot of regrets. I think that on one hand the imperfections and the eccentricities of these recordings that I made, almost on my own, are interesting but I do wish on the other hand that I had reached out more beyond my very limited sphere and invited more collaborators into the studio to help me.

I think there’s something about a lot of my early recordings that unless you have an appetite to hear a sometimes angry, sometimes desperate young woman entering the realm of her own feminism and just struggling in society for respect and for some sense of personal power ... you’re not going to be necessarily invited in by those recordings. So, I think that along the way if I had had other mediating voices saying, ‘alright, okay, that’s cool but let’s try to slow it down,’ or ‘let’s try to speed it up’ or ‘let’s try to do this or that’ or just translate what I do to record, that would have been cool because again it’s all a learning process.