Most acoustic performers pad their sets with ballads, conserving their energy for a handful of up-tempo songs. Not DiFranco. At the Barrymore, she set her phasers on stun before hitting the boards, and rarely dialed them down. Hurtling through material drawn mostly from her 1994 album Out of Range during the first set, she maintained a telepathic connection with her percussionist/sidekick Andy Stochansky and nailed the stop-start changes of "Buildings and Bridges" and the disc's skittering title cut. She also tossed a few good-natured bombs at the traditional folk scene of sing-alongs and gentle strumming. Amused and a little bugged by the moony-eyed decorum displayed by a far too respectful audience in Chicago the night before, she snickered: "People have the funniest ideas about folk music. Like you have to sit and listen to it."
Yup, she's one acoustic performer who doesn't mind moshing. In fact, she encourages it, and the Barrymore crowd responded to the furious funk of "How Have You Been," a canny assessment of a love affair cut short by the demands of her career, with the kind of unfettered wiggling you usually witness at punk shows. Barely tethered by the 25-foot guitar chord that whipped behind her, DiFranco was just as pumped up during the second half of her glorious gig. She threw in a couple oldies, but concentrated on tunes from a brand new disc that hasn't yet hit the racks. Did she regret passing over the crowd-pleasers in favor of unfamiliar material? Not a chance. She's the special kind of performer who can make even the moldiest cliche reverberate with meaning, and when her nasal mezzo-soprano wasn't jacking the new stuff, her flailing chording was. Factor in her willingness to address complex gender issues and her ability to deliver get-off-your-ass advice to the young and feckless without seeming preachy or self-righteous, and you've got everything a punked-up protest singer ought to be.
No wonder she was called back for encore after encore. She's as good as they come -- and clearly her own woman.