Ani DiFranco: Braving the Storms

"First leak it out about the president

then stand up and shout 'Impeachment'

Pulling coat tails out from under that little VP

Before he has a chance to get in the driver's seat"

-- "Millennium Theater" (download)

Ani DiFranco has never been one to mince words in her lyrics, and the wallop of an album that is her new release, Reprieve, hits the stores on Aug. 8. (Download an exclusive prerelease of "Millenium Theater"). After recording the album in her New Orleans studio, mostly before Katrina left her stranded and unable to finish it, DiFranco did what everyone else in the Gulf Coast did after the storm: She improvised.

But improvisation seems to be nothing new to the 35-year-old folk rocker from upstate New York. Founding her own record label, Righteous Babe, in the early '90s, DiFranco's music has continued to resonate with fans who appreciate her honesty and forthright style, not to mention the ever-evolving sound of her albums. The lines between personal and political evaporated long ago for the self-named "little folksinger," and AlterNet had a chance to catch up with DiFranco in late June 2006.

Deanna Zandt: Let's talk about the making of the album and what happened with your recordings.

Ani DiFranco: It was recorded last July in my little apartment in the Bywater, in the middle of New Orleans. Then, of course, the storm hit in August. I had -- very fortuitously -- moved out of that apartment just before on August 1, into the Quarter. So, I was high and dry for the storm.

We had recorded the bed tracks, and then the big spiral with the big flashing arrow pointing towards at New Orleans started to appear on every TV screen. We were actually in the last wave of ne'er-do-wells to leave town on Sunday night. We got in the contraflow, all that traffic, and drove through some of the arms of the storm which were already appearing the day before. It was wild, wild weather. We headed to Lafayette for what we thought was a few days. Everyone evacuated thinking, "Oh, the power will be out for a few days; it'll be hot, let's go."

Then the news reports started rolling in, and later we just started panicking, thinking, "Oh my God, we left all the master tapes …" We were in the middle of my record, we were in the middle of the new Hamell on Trial record, and my partner is also a record maker, so there was no end to the masters we'd left behind in New Orleans. We decided, "All right, we gotta go get 'em."

So we got into my friend's mother's Toyota Corolla and drove into town from Lafayette. I must say, it was incredibly easy. There were maybe about four or five roadblocks along the way. I mean, you had about eight guys trying to lock down the city. It was an impossibility. Every time they would say, "Get off at the next exit, ma'am," we would say, "Sure," and keep going.

We cruised right into town, and saw not one Army truck, not a single National Guard person, no FEMA people, nothing. No one. The storm hit Monday morning, and this was Thursday afternoon. Flooding, absolute flooding, craziness. Devastation, people on their roofs, and we saw nobody there to help. And any reports of "you can't get in there" were, I can tell you, bullshit. We couldn't believe this was the United States of America. I felt more naive than I have in a long time. We just saw a lot of poor, mostly dark-skinned people abandoned, thirsty, hungry, roaming the streets, under and on bridges … it was insane.

There were all these reports that they were not even letting people walk over the bridge. People without cars or credit cards who attempted to evacuate on foot, they were turning them around on the bridge. People would come from the Ninth Ward in droves from their flooded, devastated neighborhoods to the National Guard station on the levy, and they were turned away at gunpoint, like, "Get the fuck outta here."