To which the singer-songwriter replies in that song, "It's nice that you listen. It'd be nice if you joined in."
Certainly, DiFranco - who plays the Somerville Theater Saturday - has taken more than her share of heat for starkly frank lyrics. "People try to frame me In terms of having a very alternative lifestyle," she says. "But I think I have a very normal lifestyle... People just choose not to talk about the difficult things."
"I see all my music - the anger, the love songs, whatever - as coming from a place of respect, and it's that I care so much," says DiFranco, on the phone at a tour stop in Canton, NY." I expect more from this world. We can do better."
Noting her song "Out of Range," which says, "Something's so unfair when the men of the hour can kill half the world in war, or make them slaves to a superpower, and let them die poor," she adds, "If you're not angry about something, then you don't care enough. Because there's so much injustice."
In turn, while her "Out of Range" CD includes more outright love song than usual ("It must have been a good year," she says) DiFranco's pointed raveups have yielded more attention.
"We all have our own `us and them,' and my `us' includes men and women of like mind who treat people with respect," says the 23-year-old performer, who can match quick-tongued lyrics with a percussive touch on acoustic guitar: "There are occasionally men who will try and reduce me to being this angry militant. It's one emotion of many that ends up in the songs, but because they don't want to hear it, they pick up on it immediately."
Particularly in the case of "Blood in the Boardroom," a song from her last CD that used menstruation as a metaphor for leaving a life-conscious stain on the seat of a male corporate world. "It was me, young artist going into a record company boardroom of a major label, she says, "and having this sort of poetic occurrence that I don't think this world Is humanizing and affirming. I think it's exploitive and I'm outta here."
She had indeed resisted overtures from major and independent labels alike, releasing six CDs In four years on her own Righteous Babe Records, based in her native Buffalo.
"I don't know why anybody would work for somebody else if they could work for themselves," says DiFranco, who lives on New York's Lower East Side. "I have complete artistic control. l don't have to compromise myself politically or financially. I don't have to support a multinational music business/corporation scene that I don't wish to support."
Five years ago DiFranco also rejected a scene where men would size up a woman for her looks - by shaving off her hair. "I thought I would rather you just listen to my music." she says. "Men don't smile at you as much. But at least when they do smile, you know it's genuine and not necessarily a come-on.
"I think I caught a glimmer of what racism might be like," she says. "Conversations would stop when I would enter the room, or people would move to the other end of the subway platform, or follow me around stores. It's a very subtle thing, but it's very claustrophobic after a while." "It's the music that's important to me, and not the fame and fortune," says DiFranco - who has since grown a new hairstyle. "So I'm doing it the most genuine way that I can."
- Paul Robicheau