Forty Shows and a Tuesday Night
The man standing next to me at the bar had seen Ani DiFranco nearly 40 times. I had known him for less than half an hour.
His wife was supposed to be there, he told me, but she wasn’t feeling well. He lived nearby and had been seeing DiFranco since the 1990s — sharing a beer with her once, visiting Righteous Babe Records in Buffalo, collecting shows the way some people collect years.
By the time we started singing together, none of that felt unusual. At Belly Up in Solana Beach, the Aug. 11 stop on Ani DiFranco’s Spirit of Love Tour didn’t just fill a venue; it gathered a roomful of people who had been carrying her songs for decades and were still finding new ways to live inside them.
All around us, strangers talked like old friends. People swayed shoulder to shoulder. Songs stored in our minds for years moved between the stage and the crowd until the room felt less like a concert venue and more like someone’s living room.
I learned that feeling in actual living rooms.
Where the First Songs Found Me
In my early twenties, someone would pull out a guitar and the whole house would shift. People sat on the floor, couples claimed the couch, someone leaned against a wall, and friends wandered in from the kitchen, squeezing into whatever space remained. No one announced anything. You stopped and listened.
That was where I first found Ani DiFranco.
I was living with three cousins when one of them put on “Living in Clip”. As songs like “32 Flavors” and “Sorry I Am” traveled down the hallway, several of us gathered on her bedroom floor, pulled in by DiFranco’s voice and the startling directness of what she had to say.
I was also struggling to come out.
Sometimes, you sense things about yourself before you can put them into words. DiFranco sang about women and desire, politics and anger, love and independence. She was able to be funny, confrontational, sexual, wounded, and tender, all without hiding the contradictions.
For my hidden queer heart, that sense of possibility was intoxicating. Her songs didn’t tell me exactly who I was, but they showed me there were more ways to become myself than I had thought. In my twenties, I needed to hear that.
Almost thirty years later, I find that I still do, but now for different reasons.
I arrived at Belly Up as a journalist, with cameras hanging from my shoulders instead of CDs in my hands. Outside, concertgoers lined Cedros Avenue while the sun set over Solana Beach. Inside the old Quonset hut that has been the venue for years, a new group of artists was keeping some of DiFranco’s independent spirit alive.
The Shape of What We Carry
California singer-songwriter Wryn opened the night with an expressive, melodic set made more intimate by their willingness to speak plainly about their life. They talked about recovering from a brain tumor and recently taking testosterone. “Pushing” became an expression of queer and trans solidarity born of a desire to change a world that can be painfully hostile to someone you love.
The connection was difficult to miss. Wryn is part of Righteous Babe Records, the independent label DiFranco founded in 1990. Many people in the room had first encountered DiFranco when hearing a woman speak openly about sexuality, feminism and queerness still felt radical. Now another queer artist was standing on a stage supported by the infrastructure DiFranco had built.
That was precisely the point.
The Architect Returns to the Stage
It wasn’t the same story, the same generation or even the same vocabulary. After a brief intermission, DiFranco walked onstage, guitar in hand, and the room snapped to attention.
At Belly Up, there was little separation between performer and audience. A rug covered the stage beneath DiFranco and her band, who played close together only a short distance from the crowd. Dressed in khaki cargo pants, black boots and a sleeveless black T-shirt, DiFranco moved easily between her band mates.
Then there were her hands.
Black tape wrapped several of her fingers as they moved across the guitar at a pace that could look almost violent if the playing weren’t so controlled. Chords came rapidly. Her picking was relentless but exact. She attacked the instrument, coaxed rhythm from it and left enough space inside all that motion for the songs to breathe.
Her voice has changed with time, too. It remains unmistakably hers — warm one moment, sharp the next — but now carries additional depth. She sang not as someone revisiting an old catalog, but as an artist who still fully inhabits it.
She opened with “Little Plastic Castle,” and considering today’s political climate, it was difficult to imagine a better choice. Released in 1998, the song circles judgment, conformity and the absurdity of the boxes people build for one another. Nearly three decades later, those ideas have hardly become relics.
Between songs, DiFranco spoke quietly about politics and the exhaustion that comes from fighting battles that should have been resolved long ago. You could sense the fatigue in the room, not quite resignation, but a tiredness that comes from realizing progress is not always straightforward.
Even so, the night gradually became more cheerful. She talked warmly about Solana Beach and how welcome she felt there. The crowd responded with the same warmth. People gave each other space, both physically and in spirit.
Past, Present, and the Chords in Between
While I walked around the venue with my cameras, people eagerly shared their stories. Some talked about Belly Up, while others shared memories about Ani. Queer women stood next to straight couples. Friends danced together, and longtime fans recognized songs as soon as they started.
Eventually I met the man at the bar.
He said he kept going back to DiFranco’s shows because she feels genuine, and there’s a special kind of excitement that spreads through the crowd.
Then the opening notes of “Gravel” rang out.
The crowd erupted.
People sang along with DiFranco and with each other. My new friend and I danced near the bar, joining in as DiFranco played a powerful guitar solo on stage. For a few minutes, everyone felt connected.
The Next Room
Music can collapse time that way.
One guitar chord and suddenly you are standing in two rooms at once. When we talk about artists with long careers, we focus on their evolution. We talk less about our own.
The person who listened to an Ani DiFranco song in 1997 might not be the same person hearing it in 2026. We have had relationships, some that worked out and others that didn’t. We have come out, started families, lost loved ones, and changed careers. We have seen our bodies age and our beliefs become less certain. Songs we thought we understood at twenty now hold meanings we couldn’t have imagined back then.
That happened to me near the end of the show when DiFranco performed “Joyful Girl.”
At 48, I heard it differently.
The world is exceptionally good at providing reasons for anger and despair, particularly for women and LGBTQ+ people whose rights and identities remain subjects of public debate. Anger can be necessary; it tells us something is wrong and can move us toward action. But it can also take up so much space that there’s no room left for anything else. Fear and grief can do the same.
And then there is joy.
As I stood inside Belly Up and listened to a song I had known for years, I realized that “Joyful Girl” was not so much telling us to ignore the world, but reminding us not to give ourselves up to it completely. We weren’t only thinking about who we were when we first heard these songs. We were also seeing how much we had changed since then.
As the song shifted to the theme of what we owe each other, the individual voices blended into one. The audience was not just singing along anymore. They were giving the song back to DiFranco and to each other.
Maybe we needed the reminder.
You can care deeply about what is happening in the world and still laugh, fall in love, make art and sing as loudly as you want in a crowded room on a Tuesday night.
I thought again about my cousins and me sitting on the bedroom floor, listening to “Living in Clip.” A young woman trying to be herself, hearing Ani DiFranco for the first time.
That might be the difference between nostalgia and legacy. Nostalgia brings us back to who we were. Legacy stays with us as we grow into someone new. The songs stay, but we don’t.
And sometimes, if we’re lucky, we end up in another room.
Still singing.
Still dancing.
Still joyful.
