It wouldn't be fair to liken Ani DiFranco to Mother Jones, Lucy
Parsons, or any other labor heroines of the past, but Fellow
Workers 霠her latest effort and her second collaboration with
folk legend and activist Bruce "Utah" Phillips 霠is the most
significant labor treatise made by any contemporary pop
performer this side of Billy Bragg. Phillips, of course, provides
the voice for this, offering plain-spoken dissertations, recalling
incidents and figures in the history of labor struggles, in addition
to standards such as "Joe Hill," "Bread and Roses" and "Dump
the Bosses." DiFranco and her band, meanwhile, dress them up
with sympathetic soundscapes, ranging from haunting, dreamy
weaves to rootsy shuffles and uptempo thrashings behind
Phillips' scratchy but impassioned vocals. Fellow Workers is a
logical extension of the collaboration DiFranco began with
Phillips on the 1996 album The Past Didn't Go Anywhere, for
which she created music for recordings Phillips made on his
own. Fellow Workers is a much more organic project; the duo
joined forces for two performances before invite-only audiences
at Kingsway Studios in New Orleans, after which DiFranco
waded through the tapes to find the album that existed within.
Did you and Utah set out to make an album of labor-oriented songs?
Actually, no; the theme of the album pretty much came after the fact. Utah
had decided he wanted to make a record about anarchy, and then a lot of the
recurring themes in what he had to talk about at the time were labor history.
So I started eliminating and editing around that focus; it was like I looked at
all the cards in front of me and started playing, and this was the theme that
stood out. The precedent we established on the first record was he does his
thing and gives me free rein to sculpt an album around it. He just gives me
license to make those kind of calls, I guess.
What's your own orientation on unions and labor issues?
Well, I've been a card-carrying musicians' union member since puberty. And I
won't cross a picket line if I'm playing at a place where employees are on
strike. I was kind of interested in making that the theme of the record
because I think a lot of young people don't really have a consciousness
about such a thing. I think young people are born into this disillusionment
that labor unions are inherently corrupt and in the way, but I think that there's
a lot of history and an important basis for that, which young people don't
necessarily know about. There's so many un-unionized large corporations
that everybody seems to work for right now, and there's not really a
consciousness of "We need a union." I think we need to get back to that
awareness. Now, you don't have a Rockefeller or some big-bellied line boss
exploiting you, you have some multi-national, nameless corporation, but I
think the dynamic therein is much the same, and we need to learn from our
history.
You have Soul Asylum's Dave Pirner on the album, playing trumpet
on "The Long Memory." How did that happen?
He's close friends with some of the folks at that studio, so he was just
hanging around, checking out what was going down. We would play music at
night, as I'm wont to do, and I knew Dave 霠but I didn't know he played
trumpet. He whipped out his trumpet one night and was just jamming with
us, so I just invited him to play on the second of the two performances. I
thought it was a nice addition to the palette of instruments already there, so I
stuck him on the album.
What are your plans at the moment? Are you working on another
album of your own?
Well, I've got a big tour coming up for the summer, then I'm going to start
working on my record, so I'm hyper-busy. I try not to think too much before I
start playing music about how I should I play music. I just sort of do it.
It's always been surprising that you've never been part of the Lilith
Fair. Have they asked?
Yeah, they did 霠both years. I had other plans, basically. I tried to make
room for a date or two, but it didn't quite happen. But I'd like to. There are
women's music festivals that have been going on for many, many years, but
Lilith is basically a straighter, more mainstream version of a gathering of
women to play music. I think it's a great concept, because so many festivals
are just inherently, by default, men's music festivals. But we don't think of
them that way. To provide a space for a lot of women's voices and
sensibilities to intermingle can be a very interesting, beautiful experience 霊for any sex.
--
※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.twbbs.org)
◆ From: h28.s101.ts.hin