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discordant piano noodling. I know, I know – neither ‘Baby Let’s Play House’ nor ‘(Hit Me) Baby One More Time’ begins with piano noodling, and they wouldn’t have been much good if they had; that’s not what pop is supposed to be about. But DiFranco’s song is nothing if not ambitious, because what it does – or, at any rate, what it pretends to do – is describe the genesis of its own creation: it shows its workings, in a way that would delight any maths teacher. When it kicks off, the noodling sounds impressionistic, like a snatch of soundtrack for an arty but emotional film – maybe Don’t Look Now , because the piano has a sombre, churchy feel to it, and you can imagine Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie wandering aroundVenice in the cold, grieving and doomed. But it cheers up a little, when DiFranco makes out that she’s suddenly hit upon the gorgeous little riff that gives the song its spine. She’s not quite there yet, because she hasn’t found anything to do with her left hand, so there’s a little bit more messing about; and then, as if by magic (although of course we know that it’s merely the magic of hard work and talent) she works out a counterpoint, and she’s there. Indeed, she celebrates the birth of the song by shoving the piano out of the way and playing the song proper on acoustic guitar – the two instruments are fused together with a deliberately improbable seamlessness on the recording, as if she wants us to see this as a metaphor for the creative process, rather than as the creative process itself. It’s a sweet idea, a fan’s dream of how music is created; I’d love to be a musician precisely because a part of me believes that this is exactly how songs are born, just as some people who are not writers believe that we are entirely dependent on the appearance of a muse.
    And, thankfully, the song proper isn’t anticlimactic: ‘You Had Time’ is perhaps the gentlest and most generous-spirited break-up song I know. (And just as the intro is a talentless fan’s dream of musical creativity, this generous-spiritedness is a liberal heterosexual’s idea of how nice gaywomen are to each other, even when their relationships fail. While straight men are inwardly plotting revenge while feigning indifference, and straight women are cutting the crotches out of expensive trousers, gay women are hugging and crying and pledging eternal friendship. This is actually offensive nonsense, of course – unhappily, the only intelligent right-on response is to recognize that gays are as violent, unpleasant, pious, judgemental and unreflective as everyone else – but ‘You Had Time’ is so sweet-tempered that it inspires this sort of embarrassing stereotyping.) What gives ‘You Had Time’ some of its power is that, whereas most break-up songs are definitively heartsick, this is a song about indecision and stasis. The narrator has just returned from a tour of some kind; both her fingers and her voice are sore, so we must presume that she is a guitarist and singer (you must forgive us, Ani, if we temporarily confuse fiction and autobiography). It becomes apparent that, while away, the narrator is supposed to have sorted out what she wants to do about her relationship, and so the title of the song, it becomes clear, is her lover’s predictable and legitimate retort to the age-old plea. Anyway, she’s had all this time, and she still hasn’t made up her mind . . . Except, the song manages to imply, she has, really: she knows it’s over. In one lovely, and very sad,couplet, the narrator says, simply: ‘You are a china shop and I am a bull / You are very good food and I am full’ . . . See what I mean about generous-spiritedness? How many of us wouldn’t have felt better about being dumped if someone said that to us? But the song ends dreamily, with