Ani DiFranco
Allergic To Water
Righteous Babe

www.righteousbabe.com
 

Carpel Tunnel Syndrome may have forced her to tamper her power-cord guitar assault, but poetic depth and sharp-edged literacy remain as potent as ever on Ani DiFranco’s twenty-eighth studio album, Allergic to Water. DiFranco’s most intimate and relaxed work, the twelve-track CD seeps with emotion. Pain reflects in several tunes.

“Careless Words” recalls a bitter breakup. The title track laments, “A good day is one when that ache in my brain can remain at a doable three.” Other tunes confront the suffering. DiFranco accepts that “pain is a teacher to be welcomed and not feared,’ and “greatness has a price – just ask Abraham Lincoln or Miles Davis’ wives,” during “Happy All the Time,” and sheds off the “madness and suffering of the human race” during the Motown-esque “Woe Be Gone.” Although Allergic to Water marks her first album as producer, several songs reflect on DiFranco’s romance and marriage to her former producer Mike Napolitano. During “See See See See,” she pleads for him to “tell me with your eyes, tell me in the glance of a hand.” During “Genie,” she recounts the steps leading to their marriage, recalling that, though she had sometimes felt like “a genie in a bikini coming out of a jar,” she was “Sometimes stuck in my mind” and ready to “say goodbye to the game,” before her husband came “out of the blue like twilight’s first star.” She reflects on her options during “Yeah Yr Right,” singing, “I could be your wife, you could be my pimp, or we could get up in the daytime and raise a kid.” The balance between good times and bad frames the album. “Harder Than It Needs to Be” reflects on domestic conflict, DiFranco singing “It’s exactly as hard to talk to you as it is to talk to me.” Yet, with the final two songs, she comes to terms with emotional divide. She realizes, during “Still My Heart,” that “the many things that don’t suck rival the things that do,” and “You better take your lemons and make your lemonade,” during the closing tune, “Rainy Parade.”

Accompanied by bassist Todd Sickafoose and New Orleans-born drummer/hand percussionist Terence Higgins), with help from Ivan Neville (Wurlitzer, clavinet), Mike Dillon (triangle), Matt Perrine (sousaphone), and Jenny Scheinman (violin, background vocals), DiFranco recorded Allergic to Water during two four-day sessions – a year and a half apart (separated by the birth of her second child).

— Craig Harris