VIA PRESS RELEASE | Singer/songwriter/feminist/activist author Ani DiFranco announces her newest venture, Righteous Babe Radio.
RBR Radio will emphasize live music, bootlegs, book excerpts, talks, interviews and other spoken word projects from DiFranco, Righteous Babe artists and many more. The online station officially launches on April 15th with a broadcast of Ani’s show in Atlanta from the Variety Playhouse in 2013 at 9pm CT. Check out Righteous Babe Radio at www.righteousbaberadio.com. As always with Righteous Babe, the spirit of fierce independence continues with Righteous Babe Radio. Although she had originally been approached years before to host her own radio show, DiFranco passed with her firm belief of self-sufficiency intact. Now, with folks socially distanced and isolated, it seems like the best time for DiFranco to impart her dream of community via the internet airways.
About the RBR Radio debut, DiFranco visualizes, “Sharing the music of my brilliant friends and collaborators… nerding out on revered influences… amplifying the sounds and words of my political and cultural inspirations. (In my fantasy, this is all magically at my fingertips!) I love national public radio, I love community radio, I love college radio.
When I’ve lived in different cities, at different times in my life, I’ve kept company with different stations and those stations have felt like integral parts of my experience of each city. Living [not super commercial] radio has been a companion to me my whole life. I shudder to think where our “informed electorate” would be without NPR. I’ve never been lonely in New Orleans thanks to OZ. In the aftermath of Katrina, even local talk radio became an essential community bulletin and information lifeline.”
A 24-hour station, Righteous Babe Radio will feature previously unreleased live Ani shows from the archives that will air Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday nights at 9pm CT and a new show will be added every week. Before these live shows, at 8pm CT, RBR Radio will feature an hour of music from the many artists whom Ani has shared the stage with, including Anais Mitchell, Pieta Brown, Peter Mulvey and more.
Also, RBR Radio offers an interview series airing Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at Noon CT and again at 5pm CT. You may hear something from Ani’s book tour or some more recent conversations where Ani interviews other artists regarding life in this Covid-19 world. Podcasts echoing Righteous Babe’s independent vision will be aggregated there as well. Content will continue to be added, Ani says, as “we move forward together to make this station as righteous and informative as it can be.”
DiFranco released NO WALLS AND THE RECURRING DREAM last year to great acclaim. In the memoir, DiFranco recounts her early life from a place of hard-won wisdom, combining personal expression, the power of music, feminism, political activism, storytelling, philanthropy, entrepreneurship, and much more into an inspiring whole. In these frank, honest, passionate, and often funny pages is the tale of one woman’s eventful and radical journey to the age of thirty.
Ani’s coming of age story is defined by her ethos of fierce independence–from being an emancipated minor sleeping in a Buffalo bus station, to unwaveringly building a career through appearances at small clubs and festivals, to releasing her first album at the age of 18, to consciously rejecting the mainstream recording industry and creating her own label, Righteous Babe Records. In these pages, as in life, she never hesitates to challenge established rules and expectations, maintaining a level of artistic integrity that has impressed many and antagonized more than a few. Ani continues to be a major touring and recording artist as well as a celebrated activist and feminist, standing as living proof that you can overcome all personal and societal obstacles to be who you are and to follow your dreams.
