Ani Di Franco: The Songwriter on Her Debut Picture Book

[A condensed version of this interview appears in the March/April 2023 issue of Writer's Digest.]

Ani Di Franco has never shied away from a challenge. In 1990, five years after becoming an emancipated minor at age 15, the Grammy Award–winning singer/songwriter released her eponymous debut album on her own record label, Righteous Babe Records. Now, more than 30 years, 22 studio albums, a book of poetry, and a New York Times–bestselling memoir later, she’s tackling a new endeavor: authoring children’s books.

On March 7, Rise x Penguin Workshop, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers, will publish The Knowing, Di Franco’s debut picture book. Featuring art by first-time illustrator Julia Mathew, the book is written as a rhyming lullaby and is designed to be read or sung; a companion song performed by Di Franco is available for purchase through RighteousBabe.com. The book is the first in a two-book deal, with the second book (and its accompanying track) due to be released in fall 2024.

WD recently spoke with Di Franco about her creative process, working on a strict deadline, and the welcome challenge of writing a seemingly simple lullaby.

Order a copy of The Knowing by Ani Di Franco.

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Let’s start by talking about the title. What is “the knowing”?

It’s awareness, consciousness, which I think exists at a level even more primary than all of the signifiers of identity. People have so many different words for it. Some people call it God, and that means many things to different people. My word for God is light; I feel like light is that energy of consciousness that beams through and from us. I think the younger you are, the more tapped in you are to that essential spirit in people around you. All of these uniforms that we wear and labels that we put on each other mean nothing to very young beings, which is such a wonderful state of existence. I mourn the fact that we lose it as we get sucked into culture and defined as this, not that … Meanwhile, we’re all one thing; we’re just refractions of this light. I wanted to communicate with young people in a way that affirmed their experience of people’s essence, their essential being, their spirit underneath all the uniforms and all the stuff.

I realized when I listened to the song version of The Knowing that if one were to distill all of your work over the last 30 years to a single message, this is it. It’s like this is your thesis of sorts.

Oh, I dig it. Thank you for bringing that broad view of my work in. I think you might be right. I have other new songs that are for grownups that I’m speaking from different angles to that same thing. I feel like these days we’re so mired in identity. I imagine this technology that we’re living through sort of exacerbates that. I’ve got a teenager and an almost 10-year-old and there’s so many labels attached to everyone all the time. I wonder how much time and energy it takes to maintain all of that, and the constrictions that come with that.

Again, young beings are so free of all that, and I think they inhabit more of a natural state of flux where [they think], “I might have done something bad. That’s not because I’m a bad kid, it’s just because I did something bad. I might want this now or feel this now, but I don’t need to take that on as an identity.” If only us adults could embrace that state of flux.

Early on, you were considered so outspoken. You sang of politics, feminism, the death penalty—even the fact that you sang about being bisexual was taboo. But over the past decade or so, language has evolved, and it can be really easy to say things that offend. As someone who communicates through writing and often tackles challenging subjects, how do you navigate that? Do you have it in mind as you write, or do you try to tune it out?

It’s tricky, for sure. I try to tune it out long enough to create things, but it’s hard. And I definitely feel like it’s getting trickier and harder. People are much less tolerant, I think, in many ways, of diverse perspectives, even as we assert our diversity in culture. It’s this really interesting play of opposites.

Thirty years into this, making songs and offering them to the world—it’s not any easier to be authentic and hope that I don’t get beaten down for it. I just have to hold myself to that same standard of, are you putting yourself above anybody? No. Are you not listening to anybody? No. I think I’m trying to be a good ally and citizen and person. I have these other new songs that I don’t think everybody is gonna be happy to hear [laughs] and I imagine I have shit coming my way. And it’s worrying, it’s terrifying, but I can’t get too mired in playing the game.

It wouldn’t be your music if you did.

Yeah. It’s funny—my manager said a few times recently, “They fell in love with you in the first place because you were the one who would say it, even though you’d get shit for it. And now that you continue to do that ...”

How dare you?

How dare I. So, if people want to cancel me or kick me off the planet, then OK. [laughs] I’ll accept that before I’ll accept pretending and hiding and playing some kind of game of what can and cannot be said. I think it’s so important for everybody to be able to speak freely, so that we know who each other is. And then you get to the hurdle of, do you kick somebody off the planet that you disagree with? Or do you try and engage with them? And do you find routes to common ground and compassion and forgiveness when somebody offends or oversteps? That’s the real nitty gritty, but until you have authentic and open dialogue, you can’t even get to that point.

Did you read any children’s books or listen to lullabies as a way to prepare for this project?

No. I mean, having two kids, I certainly have read a lot of children’s books. When you have kids, you get into kids’ books, and you find the ones you love and the ones your kids love. I didn’t want to study in order to calculate the magic formula. I can’t be Mo Willems, you know? There’s only one Mo Willems and there’s only one Dr. Seuss. I’ve been there with two kids over and over, so I had a sense of what kind of pace worked for me and my kids, and when there’s too many words on one page, that kind of thing. I worked mostly on instinct.

You’re also a visual artist, but Julia Mathew did the artwork for the book. What was that process like? Did you work with her directly?

The publisher was the one who decided that I should be just the author, not the artist as well, which was surprising and a little bit disappointing at first because I was looking forward to that aspect of it. But I’m of that age where saying yes is easier. I’ve done so much on my own, so when somebody says, “Hey, how about you delegate this aspect?” I think at this point in my life, I’m more prepared psychologically and emotionally to say, “OK, we’ll try that idea.”

They did whatever process they do to find the artist that they think was suited to the project and they presented me with one artist: her. [Laughs] I looked at her work, and I was like, “It’s beautiful. Let’s go for it.” In terms of working with her, they asked me what direction I wanted to give her, and I said, “None. This is why you would bring in another artist, to get their perspective and their soul involved. What does she see when she reads the words or hears the recorded version? That’s what I want: I want her to bring herself to it.” I have so many years of collaborating with musicians and I have experienced many times that if I try to get somebody else to do what I would do, you don’t get anybody’s vision. You get something halfway in between. I didn’t want to do that. I just said, “I have no direction. I want to her to express herself. That’s my direction.”

Honestly, the publishing company was the one to really get involved with the finer details—a little to the left, a little of this, a little of that. I appreciated their attention to consistency, things that my eye was not trained to notice. Like, “The protagonist looks to be six here and looks to be more like nine in this bit. The braid is up here and now it’s down here on the same day.” They were very attuned to all those little details. It was really a back and forth between the publisher and the artist and I was just witness to it.

What can you share about the second children’s book you’re working on?

The second book is going to be about voting. When my kids were little, I tried every time to take them with me when I voted. I think you have to model things for kids. You can’t just tell them, “You should vote when you’re an adult.” What you do and what you show them is what they know an adult does, so I wanted to make a story that shows a mother and [her child] going to vote. My plan is to make it a song that’s also a book as well. I already have a sketch of it that I proposed and the publisher accepted, so we’re on our way toward that book.

So much of your work is done for Righteous Babe Records, where you’re your own boss. Does writing something like this that is deadline-driven change your creative process?

It’s really different because I am so used to just doing my art off in my own little private Idaho. So yeah, even this book, the publisher worked with me through a lot of details. And it’s super different for me to have somebody involved in the process and giving feedback and asking for adjustments. Once again, I’m glad I’m 52 doing it this way and not 25 because I think I would have been way more resistant to other people’s input, but with age comes a little more flexibility, a little more humility, at least for me. I’ve written hundreds of songs all on my own with nobody saying anything, and recorded, produced, and released them that way, too. [Now], I’m like, “OK, let’s try input. Let’s try collaboration.” That’s a new territory for me, really.

This is your first children’s song. How was it to write a lullaby versus one of your usual songs?

It made me realize my writing incorporates a lot of things on the regular that are meaningless to children. I like to mess with social conventions, I like to turn cliches on their head, I like to have double meanings—all of which mean nothing to children because they don’t know the original cliché, they don’t know the double entendre, they don’t operate in that world of cultural reference and deconstruction, and all of that stuff I do all day long when I’m making songs. So, I have to write from a different brain [with lullabies], just try to put myself in a world where none of that exists and say things much more simplified.

The melody sounds more traditional than your usual work, too.

Yeah. I didn’t really think about straightening up the melody. That’s just how it came out. But certainly the writing of the words [is more traditional]. It’s a good challenge for me as a writer, having gone so deep into my own voice and my own instincts—to have to pull all the way out and go a different way is cool. Get my Pablo Neruda on.

I remember once translating a book of poetry of mine into Italian. And it’s a much harder job than Pablo Neruda. His poems, for instance, [are] such basic, simple language—incredibly beautiful and universal and deeply affecting, but much different than [my work] that gets into these kinds of cultural minutiae. I found myself sitting with this Italian translator: “Do you mean this?” “Well, I sort of mean this, but I also am sort of sneakily meaning this, which is implied.” It becomes very tricky to pull that out of this culture and language and put it into a different culture and language. That was another instance of showing me that realm that my writing operates in. So [The Knowing] was one of those exercises of “take off your Ani boots, put on your Pablo Neruda boots.”

Through your Patreon account, you’ve shared recorded songs and poems that were never released, but that ultimately became other songs or poems from your albums. How often do you record something that ultimately morphs into something else? How do you know when a song is done? Or are they never done?

They’re kind of never done. I mean, certainly, the enshrining on record is not an endpoint for me. Just the other night, I was playing a gig and somebody requested “Fuel,” which is a poem that I recorded in one way 20-some years ago and I’ve never played it that way since. I just have this whole other way of playing the music that goes behind the poem now. So, what’s the right way to play that song? I mean, according to me, not the way it’s recorded. [laughs] So who knows? Songs definitely continue to evolve.

You occasionally change lyrics to old songs, too. It’s interesting the way the songs continue to transform over time.

Yeah. Sometimes a lyric that I wrote long ago, or even not-so-long-ago, doesn’t sit right with me anymore. Like, there’s this song about reproductive freedom that I wrote a few years ago, “Play God,” and I’ve played it a lot because it’s a subject that’s so vital right now. But I keep thinking I gotta rework this line that says, “there’s one thing that a man needs to be free”—I’m paraphrasing—“money. And there’s two things that a woman needs”—control over her own body being the second thing. But of course, as we know, money can buy you that kind of control, so the way I wrote it in that song doesn’t acknowledge that well. And, of course, there are instances where money can’t get you free as a woman. So [the lyric is] not untrue, but it doesn’t adequately reflect how money can buy females freedom often, too. There’s just so many things to question along the way after you’ve written down [lyrics].

You’ve written hundreds, if not thousands, of songs, as well as poems, op-eds, a memoir, and now a children’s book. Are there any other writing projects you’d like to try that you haven’t done yet?

What’s left? [laughs] Oh! I know what’s left! A screenplay. Actually, I’m in the very early stages of talking to people about making something that actors act. It’s so early that it might be a stage play, it might be a TV thing, it might be a movie. I don’t even know. I’m really excited by that idea of getting involved in a type of writing project that’s super different and an even more extreme diversion from “Ani alone in her own head and her own space,” a very collaborative kind of endeavor. I would find that fascinating and challenging. So that may come to bear. I don’t know. We’re in the early talking phase.

What do you want readers to get from this book?

I want both parent and child to remember that no matter what you’re called or not called, no matter how you’re defined or what box you’re put in, you’re more than that. I tried to include in the book all the ways that people are defined, that a child might be described or told, “This is what you are. You’re smart, you’re pretty, you’re dumb, you’re bad, you’re Black, you’re white, you’re exceptional, you’re a problem.” Whatever it is that you’re told you are, know that you are more than that and that your possibilities are really endless.