Ahead of her performance at Glastonbury, the activist singer-songwriter will take on questions about wearing Prince out and rejecting the major label system

Ani DiFranco may be the only musician ever to have tired Prince into submission. When they jammed in 1999, he and his band called it quits after four hours while the Buffalo songwriter kept dancing. “After being with her, it dawned on me why she’s like that,” Prince said. “She’s never had a ceiling over her.”

DiFranco has been tirelessly doing things to her own beat since 1989. She formed her own label, Righteous Babe, and became a defining activist voice of the 90s, calling out rape culture, racism and threats to reproductive rights in her inimitable conversational poetry. Among the artists she signed to her independent label is Anaïs Mitchell, who would go on to cast DiFranco as Persephone on her 2010 album Hadestown – now a major stage musical in which DiFranco recently starred on Broadway.