Throughout my life, there have been few constants. I moved around a lot growing up, so my family and friends are scattered through Texas. One of my best is in L.A. My parents, my sister, and now my husband and children are the central themes of my life. Also on the shortlist of constants is music.

As a young girl, I loved Neil Young and the Beach Boys. I had Michael Jackson's Black and White album on cassette tape and I would dance spastically for hours in my room to it. I was at the mercy of my parent's almost decent taste in music until I hit junior high. Alternative music was blossoming and I was discovering how satisfying the sound of empathy could be.

It began with Counting Crows and continued into Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Fiona Apple, Weezer. 8th grade brought a pretty serious 70's rock phase. Neil again, Jimi, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, and of course, Led Zeppelin. Jimmy Page inspired me to pick up the guitar and make it sound the way he did. I never got that figured out, but he got the ball rolling.

I forced my dad to teach me chords and give me his old songbooks. When I moved to San Antonio for my freshman year, I would bring my guitar to school. I attended a magnet school that emphasized creativity and learning in a group setting, so I was tolerated by teachers. Overly optimistic boys were easy to get free guitar lessons out of, and by the end of the year, I could play. The middle of that year is when I discovered Ani Difranco. Fifteen and license-less I plopped on the couch one Saturday night for a night of sulking and this slapped me in the face:

She played other songs from Not a Pretty Girl and Little Plastic Castles with such fire and ferocity. I had never seen a woman play guitar as adroitly as that before. It was an instrument she pounded on for emphasis. She demanded that it participate in her storytelling as much as her voice. I was enthralled. I went to bed that night with my little chauvinistic mind blown. I wanted to write songs and share them with conviction like that beautiful chick with the hot pink braids.

I carried on through my teenage years. I lived, I loved, I wasted time wrapped up in dramas that were life-consuming at the time but in retrospect made me look embarrassingly vapid and weak. To cope with the highs and lows, I did turn to my guitar and my pen. I followed Ani's music as she chronicled her versions of the highs and lows. I attended her shows when I could. The one I blogged about in 2006 while I was living in Austin, was particularly moving for me. I was a brand new young mother, and she played for us in the rain with her growing child in her womb:

Exerpt from my 2006 blog:

Ani With Child

Date Created: 10/18/2006 11:58:00 PM

"The opening act was a cute slight little man with military issue type glasses and an acoustic guitar who I promptly forgot about. The act after him was a poet who was very passionate and eloquent and entertaining and had me completely enthralled by his final piece. But I can't remember his name either.

Rain begins to pour towards the end of his set and the crowd pushes forward straining to huddle under the protection of the awning that comes out of the stage. The lights do a little dance and Ani pops on to stage smiling and beautiful with a reddish tint glowing around her curly hair. She launches into Knuckle Down which couldn't be a more fitting opening song. 

Her guitar hides her swelling belly. She is as energetic and charismatic as ever and yes, she glows. The only evidence I can see of her delicate condition is her arms. Normally sinewy and taut with the muscles that she has grown due to years of intense guitar playing, the muscles jump around a little deeper under her skin. My arms were the first to suffer when I was pregnant too. 

She quickly makes a reference to her pregnancy. She mentions things are different for her now, and asks all the mothers in the audience to show themselves. I am already jumping around like a chihuahua reunited with her mistress and I jump higher. Not many others do. She continues through a very satisfying set playing many songs from 2005's Knuckle Down. She gets into some oldies though with Done Wrong, Anticipate, Fourth of July (which she revealed was inspired by our own ATX), and Shameless. She throws in a heavy dose of more recent songs like Manhole, Studying Stones, Paradigm, and Recoil. She took all of my favorite songs from Knuckle Down and played them so well. 

Her right hand was wrapped in an ace bandage-I presume as a result of her bout of tendonitis-but the tatooed fingers of her left hand danced expertly along the fretboards of her many guitars. There were a couple of drunken idiot girls in front of us hanging on each other for balance while dancing/humping each other and bumping into everyone. They weren't paying attention to the woman we were all there for and they eventually pissed off a big chick near us and came within an inch of getting their asses beat. They skulked away so I ended up about two people away from the stage. The best spot ever. I had to pee so bad it hurt and I was dancing with reverence and a desire to keep from pissing on myself. But that spot was so worth it. 

Ani joked with the audience about her big pregnant lady pants and her swollen tits. She donned a pair of red suspenders volunteered by an audience member after she mentioned her slipping pants. Still, she played so long and so powerfully. When I was as pregnant as she was, a trip to the grocery store was enough to put me in bed for the rest of the day. It was a damn excursion. And this woman is on stage belting out music and laughing with us when her baby kicks in response. She is my fucking hero. 

After she came out for a quick encore and closed with Hypnotized from her new album- an ode, no doubt, to her new love- I caught a beautifully candid glimpse of her face as she walked off stage for the final time that night. She exhaled as if to say " whew", but she was smiling faintly like she knew she had put in a good night's work. I'm in love for LIFE."

This woman and her music have been a constant in my life. We are all connected and I am eternally optimistic about the poetry of this experience we are all having. It does mean something and the universe is gently offering us guidance. I believe right now, I'm being led towards a place of balance in my life in which I can feed my creativity while seeking the satisfaction that comes from pursuing worthy goals. Writing and creating for me, are necessary tools for expressing the things I'm not quite ready to say. I've avoided my old friends too long; I've become a rusty statue of my former fearlessness. 

Again, it's Ani who reignites the flame of inspiration. She has written a song for every emotion, and a recent bout of heartache reacquainted me with how good it feels to be understood by a song. She's getting older right alongside the rest of us and is as brave as ever. As I seek both balance and achievement, I look up to her as a guide. Her music, her words, are always growing deeper, wiser. But she hangs on to her humor, is guided by love, and never turns away from her urge to create or the obligation to share her talents with the audience who grew up with her.