In 1997, a young singer-songwriter from Manhattan named Alana Davis took one of the most personal songs in Ani DiFranco’s catalog and transformed it into something entirely different. The result wasn’t just a successful cover—it was a reimagining so complete that many listeners didn’t even realize they were hearing someone else’s words.
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The Original: Ani DiFranco’s Raw Truth
“32 Flavors” first appeared on Ani DiFranco’s 1995 album “Not a Pretty Girl,” nestled among other tracks that explored themes of identity, independence, and self-acceptance with DiFranco’s characteristic blend of vulnerability and defiance. The title itself was a clever play on Baskin-Robbins’ famous “31 flavors” slogan, suggesting there’s always room for one more way to be yourself—a perfect metaphor for DiFranco’s own approach to existing outside conventional categories.
DiFranco’s original version feels like an intimate conversation, the kind you might have with yourself in a mirror at 2 AM. Her guitar work is intricate but restrained, her voice carrying that unmistakable quality of someone working through something real in real time. It’s folk music in its purest sense: one person, one instrument, one truth being excavated word by word.
The song explores the complexity of identity—how we contain multitudes, how we resist being pinned down to simple categories, how the very act of self-definition can be both liberating and exhausting. In DiFranco’s hands, it’s contemplative, almost meditative. It asks questions more than it provides answers.
Enter Alana Davis: A Different Kind of Truth
Alana Davis came from a musical family—her father, Walter Davis Jr., was an African-American pianist who had played alongside jazz legends like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. This background infused her with a different relationship to rhythm and groove than DiFranco’s folk-punk roots. When Davis encountered “32 Flavors,” she heard something that DiFranco’s version only hinted at: the song’s potential as a celebration rather than just a meditation.
Davis released her version as her debut single in 1997, making it the lead track from her album “Blame It on Me,” which would go on to be chosen as one of Time magazine’s five best albums of 1997. But this wasn’t simply a matter of taking DiFranco’s song and adding a beat. Davis rewrote significant portions, added her own chorus, and created what was technically a cover but felt entirely original.
The most striking difference is rhythmic. Where DiFranco’s version moves like a conversation, Davis’ version moves like a dance. The drums punch with confidence, the bass line grooves with purpose, and Davis’ voice rides over it all with a sense of arrival rather than searching. She transformed DiFranco’s question into a statement.
The Art of Transformation
What makes Davis’ version remarkable isn’t that it’s “better” than the original—that’s not how covers work. It’s that it serves a completely different emotional purpose while honoring the core message. DiFranco’s version is for when you’re figuring yourself out; Davis’ version is for when you’ve figured yourself out and want to celebrate that complexity.
The musical choices support this shift perfectly. The fuller arrangement, the rhythmic drive, the way Davis’ voice soars over the groove—it all adds up to a version that doesn’t just accept being “32 flavors and then some,” but revels in it. It’s the same message delivered with completely different energy.
This transformation speaks to something essential about great covers: they’re not just interpretations, they’re translations across emotional languages. Davis took DiFranco’s introspective folk meditation and translated it into something that could fill a room, get bodies moving, make people feel their self-acceptance in their chest rather than just their head.
Legacy and Impact
Davis’ version achieved significant radio success, introducing DiFranco’s message to audiences who might never have encountered it otherwise. The song even found its way into a 1999 NFL advertising campaign, proving its crossover appeal. But perhaps more importantly, it demonstrated how a song can live multiple lives, serve different purposes, and reach different people while maintaining its essential truth.
The success of Davis’ “32 Flavors” also highlighted something crucial about the late ’90s music landscape: there was hunger for music that celebrated complexity, that resisted easy categorization, that acknowledged the multifaceted nature of identity. Both versions of the song, in their different ways, provided that.
Why It Still Matters
Nearly three decades later, “32 Flavors”—in both its incarnations—feels more relevant than ever. In an era of increasing pressure to brand yourself, to fit into algorithmic categories, to be consistently on-message across all platforms, the song’s central thesis remains radical: you are allowed to be complicated. You are allowed to contain contradictions. You are allowed to be 32 flavors and then some.
Davis’ version, with its confident groove and celebratory energy, provides a soundtrack for that permission. It’s the song for when you’ve moved past apologizing for your complexity and started dancing to it instead. In a world that constantly asks us to pick a lane, sometimes the most rebellious thing you can do is turn up the bass line and refuse to choose.
That’s the gift Alana Davis gave us: she took Ani DiFranco’s beautiful, questioning meditation and turned it into a victory lap. Both songs are necessary. Both songs are true. And both songs remind us that the best covers don’t just reproduce—they reimagine, they recontextualize, and they give us new ways to understand both the song and ourselves.
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