The Martlet

Ani DiFranco drew from her musical archive, playing many older songs at the University Centre auditorium on April 22.

The stop in Victoria was part of the western arm of her tour, which started last fall to promote her first compilation album, Cannon.

At 37 years old, with 19 albums released, this fiercely political folk singer founded Righteous Babe Records and recently turned an old church into a music hall called Babeville in her hometown of Buffalo, N.Y. This was DiFranco’s first time in Victoria since 2004, when she played a solo show in the David Lam Auditorium at UVic.

This time, she was joined on stage by Todd Sickafoose on upright bass, and Allison Miller on drums, making for an upbeat show. The trio opened with “Anticipate” from her 1991 release, Not So Soft.

But it wasn’t all old stuff. DiFranco recently became a mother (apparently as a convenient excuse to take a break from her music career, though it seems she hasn’t let up at all), and she had some tender songs that spoke to her experience.

In “Present/Infant” DiFranco sang, “Here’s this tiny baby and they say she looks just like me / and she is smiling at me with that present infant glee / and I would defend to the end of the Earth her perfect right to be.”

Those might be some pretty soft lyrics for a feminist icon, but she’s never been good at fitting the mold.

Perhaps that’s why she tows along the opening trio, Animal Prufrock, to fill in (sometimes annoyingly) the über-experimental, radically-queer feminist tunes, singing about “emotional boners” and menstrual blood.

This is not to say DiFranco has traded her political edge for motherhood.

One unreleased song that wasn’t about her child was “Red Letter Year” about Hurricane Katrina, which ripped through her New Orleans home in 2005 when she was recording Reprieve.

She then bounced back a decade to sing “Fuel,” a cynical song she recorded in 1998 about slave cemeteries in Manhattan. Played together, it was easy to hear how similar the stories in the two songs were.

In this corrupt political landscape, perhaps it’s nice (or at least healthy) that she can step back a moment and enjoy the magic of motherhood, writing lyrics for her daughter like those in “Landing Gear,” a song set in labour, when she sang, “You’re gonna love this world if it’s the last thing I do.”