“I said Venice and you heard Vegas/Now I say either way, baby, let’s go.” Thus begins the journey of “Bliss Like This.” Placed in the center of Educated Guess, the new release by Ani DiFranco, this line encapsulates the perpetual fluidity of the artist. However, it metaphorically traces DiFranco’s current musical turn in reverse. She has moved from busyness to simplicity with Educated Guess, just out on her own Righteous Babe Records, and she is utterly alone — playing, singing, recording, and mixing a powerful potion of spoken word and song.

For a singer/songwriter who believes a strength of her career has been to disengage from the long view and discover day-to-day experience, major shifts are par for the course. A shift this is, from the full-band-with-horn-section jazzy outing of her last release, Evolve. Some of her newly-found aloneness, too, inevitably comes from the always unabashedly queer-identified artist’s split with husband of six years, Andrew Gilchrist. “Well, it’s just the way my life is these days,” she said, speaking of her solo recording from her home in Buffalo, NY. “I live alone and I’m alone on stage again now that I’ve bid farewell to my beloved band. I forgot … how much solitude I need to even become myself, so it was the natural thing to document these songs that I had written alone about the turn in my life.”

Educated Guess leaves in all the rough edges that would never fly for the major labels with whom DiFranco refuses to dance. An intimate affair, we get to be privy to guitar string squeaks, unexpected and beautiful harmonies, recording clicks, Beat- and street-influenced poetry, and atonal moments that bring nearer to the listener the possibility of meeting the raw emotion in the tracks head-on. It is well worth the trip and not for the faint of heart.

The angular acoustics of “Swim,” merge with and challenge its declaration of inner contentment: “I finally drove out where it’s dark enough to see stars/And found I miss no one.”

“Swim” explores the double-sided coin of strength and vulnerability, as does “Origami,” a song written and performed live long before it landed as a recorded track. “I am a paradox — as we all are — and have strengths and weaknesses, and those are always coming out side by side in my music,” DiFranco said of this recurring theme.

In “Origami,” the lines “men are delicate origami creatures /who need women to unfold them” cause wild responses from audiences. “I had no idea how that would strike people.… Women have much greater emotional prowess than men, and when it comes to the reality of their interactions with other people, [men] are delicate and not very well-equipped, often.… All the women start screaming and cheering.… I couldn’t believe how much hetero female anxiety was being released!”

The title song, “Educated Guess,” will appeal to those who like less edge to their music, but it still explores wonderfully odd harmonies not too far removed from something Zappa’s Mothers might invent, mixed with the musical essence of classic folk protest tunes.

“Animal” is an anthemic offering with a moving melody that looks unflinchingly at the human condition through a uniquely American, universally wise lens. Anyone concerned with U.S. politics or the survival of humanity ought to listen up. “It was a very difficult one to write … because mostly I try to uplift,” DiFranco said. “So to sing from a place of shame and frustration and powerless and anger… it’s hard. Often times you have to speak to the difficult, to the dark things to get through them to the light.”

DiFranco wrote “Grand Canyon,” the spoken word piece that follows, as a balance to those indictments. “I love [this] country,” she explained. “Because I love the people, because I love the land, because we have a powerful history of art and activism, and everything beautiful about this nation was fought for by activists.”

Educated Guess is for those up to the challenge of really listening — engaging life and bearing witness to the continuing evolution of a woman growing, learning, and loving with each word. As DiFranco put it, “I learn so much about my world by standing up in it and making noise.”

Robin Renée is a freelance writer and singer/songwriter whose current CD release is All Six Senses. Visit this article at www.gaylesbiantimes.com for a link to her website.