What’s weird is that both songs tonight employ a very old-skool Ani DiFranco fingerpicking style which reminds me mostly of “Rush Hour” from her first album. If you’re not an Ani fan you won’t know what the hell i’m talking about, but it’s more of a fluttering of the fingers over the top strings rather than a defined picking routine – and when rushed or played live it quickly descends into the rampant aggressive strumming that i also have stylistically in common with Ms. DiFranco. I swear… new Ani lyrics put me in a mood every time … i can almost track eras of songwriting by Ani albums i was listening to at the time. Tori just doesn’t have the same effect on me; all of my Ani-ish songs make it onto here and my demos, and all the Tori ones are chalked up as artful experiments and then shoved into a corner somewhere because i can’t seem to play them correctly. That makes it pretty obviously where my true influence lies, doesn’t it?