Let’s say you were born after Ani DiFranco founded Righteous Babe Records in 1990, in Buffalo of all places—back when indie labels were stitched together with duct tape, hope, and zines. Let’s say your only brush with the ’90s is via TikTok fashion revivals and ironic appreciation of Jewel. Even then, you’ve felt DiFranco’s influence, passed down like a feminist folk talisman: the staccato strum, the righteous anger, the no-fucks cadence of someone who carved her own lane with a bread knife.
A generational voice, DiFranco blurred the lines between folk, punk, jazz, spoken word, and political sermonizing—before it was cool, before it was commodified. She’s written songs about reproductive rights, capitalism, queerness, and the complications of being a human in this weird empire of ours. Her albums—Not a Pretty Girl, Dilate, Little Plastic Castle—were not only soundtracks for young lefty radicals but handbooks. If you didn’t cry to “Untouchable Face” in a dorm room sometime between 1995 and 2005, were you even alive?
But DiFranco’s not a relic. She’s still here, still recording, still agitating, still touring. In 2021, she published a memoir (No Walls and the Recurring Dream), and in 2023 she released Unprecedented Sh!t, an album that bristles with righteous indignation and that unmistakable DiFranco urgency. And now, she’s coming to Arrowood Farms in Accord on August 28, a setting so idyllic it might just soften her edge—though don’t count on it.
Opening is Hurray for the Riff Raff, the moniker of Alynda Segarra, a Bronx-born, Nuyorican troubadour who took to the road as a teenager and came back with songs forged in freight trains and queer punk squats. If DiFranco is the godmother of radical folk, Segarra is the heir apparent. Their 2022 album, Life on Earth, earned raves for its genre-bending eco-anxious ballads and post-Americana textures. It’s a record full of haunted forests, burning cities, and the strange beauty of surviving both. Their song “Colossus of Roads” of off 2024’s The Past Is Still Alive, continues that tradition—part cosmic prayer, part whispered chant.
Seeing both these artists on the same bill feels like a baton-passing, or maybe just a moment of convergence: two generations of genre-defiant folk-punk revolutionaries, together under the stars in Accord. DiFranco’s spiky brilliance and Segarra’s simmering strength, both rooted in justice, both disinterested in easy answers.
Bring your boots, your beliefs, and maybe a bandana. The revolution is acoustic now. Tickets go on sale on April 4 at 10am.
This article appears in March 2025.
