Ani DiFranco on performing, 1997

"Kids come up to me, and they want advice about what’s the magic formula to get the national tours and the distribution. You can see they want, want, want all these things. And I think, Maybe you should just try to get a gig. Maybe you should just get a gig, and maybe you should do that every weekend for ten years, and then see if you’re not on a haphazard national tour that grew organically and if you don’t have some recordings that you made along the way that are distributed through the people you encountered along the way."

From the book The Complete Singer-Songwriter: A Troubadour's Guide to Writing, Performing, Recording, and Business

For info on DiFranco's new CD Reprieve, click here.

In other DiFranco news, her against-all-odds project of rescuing a dilapidated church in Buffalo, and turning it into an arts center, is finally wrapping up a decade later; the Church, as it's now called, hosted its first events earlier this year. You can listen to my 2004 report on the in-progress renovation at the NPR site.