On International Women’s Day, Ani DiFranco and Rainbow Girls brought protest anthems with beautiful acoustic melodies to the Plaza Live in Orlando. Though neither act made overt political statements, they spent the night venting their frustrations and grievances through the music while a couple of thousand fans commiserated and sang along.
California trio Rainbow Girls started the night with a set of folksy ballads that focused on intricate melodies and vocal harmonies. All three members—guitarist Erin Chapin, bassist Vanessa Wilbourn, and guitarist/keyboardist Caitlin Gowdey—sang lead at times, but most of the time, they sang in three-part harmony. Each beautiful voice is soft with a bit of country twang.
Chapin introduced “Compassion to the Nth Degree” by telling the crowd, “I have compassion for all of God’s creatures. It doesn’t matter what you believe or who you voted for; all that matters is that you stop at our merch booth on the way out.” As the trio played the protest song, the crowd cheered and laughed at sarcastic lines like “I love you like I love white supremacists” and “I love you like big oil lobbyists.” The group noticed the fan interaction. “It’s so nice that you’re listening to our songs. We’re not used to that,” Chapin said.
After crooning “You Must Not Feel the Way I Do,” Rainbow Girls put their instruments down and closed the set with an a cappella cover of “Unchained Melody.” Their three voices in an otherwise silent theater carried a striking beauty, with each singer complementing the others and offering an ethereal take on an oft-covered song.
Nearly an hour later, Ani DiFranco took the stage and apologized for the delay caused by tech problems. “Some of our equipment broke. Just the soundboard, no big deal. Who needs that?” she joked.
DiFranco joked around and told stories throughout the night, talking about song inspirations and verbally processing the performance. The Canadian-American songwriter was backed by a three-piece band that fleshed out the rhythms, though DiFranco and her percussive guitar style were the focal point.4
The band stopped playing “Do or Die” when DiFranco noticed a disturbance in the crowd and then played an instrumental jam version of the song as background music while security tended to a collapsed fan. Once the situation was resolved, they restarted the song.
“I took a break in 2024, so I had to relearn a lot of my songs. When relearning my shit, I realized there’s a lot of words in my songs. At least on the older stuff, I had the sense to write a lot of la de das,” she said. “When relearning my songs, I did what anyone else does. I Googled them. And I learned the Internet is full of lies.”
DiFranco played many new songs from 2024’s Unprecedented Sh!t but also filled the setlist with crowd pleasers from earlier in her career, like the frenetic “Worthy” and the rapid-fire “Anticipate.”
The crowd sang along and seemed to know every word of DiFranco’s old songs. Her witty, politically charged songs were a perfect outlet for fans frustrated at our politics. DiFranco’s voice was strong and expressive, but her guitar work was the most impressive part of the night. Wearing finger picks, she attacked various acoustic guitars with an aggressive right-hand technique of percussive strums and staccato picking. At one point, she tore off a nail and stopped the bleeding with a towel. “It’s gonna be that kind of night, huh?” she said.
Near the show’s end, the backing band left the stage, and DiFranco played solo for “Spinning Room” and the first half of “New Bible” before the band rejoined her. They closed the regular set with the danceable groove number “Shameless.”
DiFranco and company slowed things down for the encore for two sing-along ballads, “Untouchable Face” and “32 Flavors.” With those two ballads, DiFranco emphasized her songwriting, and the fans celebrated her poetic lyrics by demonstrating that they knew all of the words to the songs that had meant so much to them over the years.
