Ani DiFranco Plays Vancouver Centre for Performing Arts

Ani DiFranco opened her show at the Centre for Performing Arts tonight, singing, "If there's one thing I've learned from all these years alone, it's how to find my own way home." Throughout the high-energy concert, she delivered on this, personifying a singer at home with herself, her audience and her unique place on the world stage.

Playing to a nearly full house, the Buffalo, New York feminist whose decision to buck the major record label system in the nineties and release music on her own terms, seemed to hold nothing back. 

"We've got a bunch of new songs to play and some old ones," she told cheering fans.  "As an old friend use to say, "The past didn't go anywhere."

A small woman, dressed in loose fitting pants and a sleeveless t shirt that seemed to deconstruct the cultural expectation of the flirty female rock star flaunting a body as well as a talent, DiFranco relied completely on  her guitar,  her voice and her band. That was all it took to satisfy and entertain. The messaging behind this divergence from the usual forms of seduction demonstrated a musical power completely unfurled, not asking for approval, or ever apologizing for its unshakeable strength. She packed a huge punch with songs like 32 Flavors and You Had Time and got people clapping along as she ripped into an old Pete Seeger song, Which Side Are You On, that she said she had remixed for the Seeger's ninetieth birthday party concert at Madison Square Garden last May. 

"Lord knows the free market is anything but free," she sang, and her fans went wild.

DiFranco's decision to create her own record label, Righteous Babe, was revolutionary at the time and opened the door for other musicians to do the same. "For several years to come, musicians will be making headlines as they jump the major label ship and take charge of their own destinies," the biography of DiFranco says on her website. "Having been there and done that, Ani DiFranco will be more than happy to just sit back and make art."

After tonight's performance, kind of hard to imagine Ani DiFranco sitting back.