Indie-folk artist and road-warrior Ani DiFranco [ tickets ] follows her recently launched summer tour with a lengthy batch of fall dates.

DiFranco--who manages to put out an average of one album per year despite spending a good chunk of life on the road--is supporting her March release, "Evolve." Though she has been touring solo of late, she recorded the album's genre-hopping 12 tracks with her five-piece band: Julie Wolf on keyboards, Hans Teuber on flute and reeds, Jason Mercer on bass, Daren Hahn on drums and Todd Horton, Ravi Best and Shane Endsley on brass.

The album's sound was the result of the divergent musical backgrounds of the musicians who played on the set, DiFranco explained in a statement.

"We developed our own vocabulary, our own aesthetic over the years," she said. "There wasn't a lot of precedent for what we were doing--we came from a lot of different places: jazz music, rock bands ... It was an interpretive collective that involved a lot of me just listening, picking up on what they brought to the table."

Live versions of two "Evolve" cuts--"Shrug" and "Welcome To"--first turned up on DiFranco's 2002 live set, "So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter."

The entrepreneurial singer-songwriter continues to issue all of her music via her own Righteous Babe record label, which she founded in 1990.