Ani DiFranco plays folk-rock Saturday at Lupo’s in Providence.

Last year, Ani DiFranco, the one-woman industry and inveterate touring and recording machine, had to hang it up for a while during a bout with tendinitis. But the time off turned out to be a blessing.

“I found lots of other benefits besides healing my wrist,” DiFranco says from her home in New Orleans. “Just emotionally and spiritually, I really needed my break. I’d been touring a lot for 15 years or so, and it didn’t occur to me to stop until I had to. …

“I allowed myself to slow up for a second, which was the most important thing. You can only put out so much before you’re empty and you’re kind of coughing up air, and I felt like I was sort of at that state [where] I’m trying to keep giving, but I’m not replenishing my own supply of ideas or thoughts, emotions, humanity, you know?”

You can hear the results on Reprieve, her latest record, released in August on her own Righteous Babe Records (as with all her discs). It’s spare, but not as frenzied as the classic DiFranco sound can often get. The trademark DiFranco percussive guitar strum gives way more often than not to fingerpicking and gentle accents, while bassist Todd Sickafoose supports and states melodies, and they both play a variety of keyboards and other instruments.

THE RECORDING of Reprieve began in DiFranco’s apartment in New Orleans. The idea was an organic effort beween herself and Sickafoose.

“I’ve experimented along — whatever — 20 records or something, with different kids of recording processes,” DiFranco says, “and I decided that the best way for me to do it is to just play the tunes live in whatever natural form they’re occurring in.”

DiFranco has been touring with Sickafoose as her sole accompaniment for several years, so when her last tour ended, they got started on the record. “I always play tunes as soon as I write ’em — the stage is almost part of the workshop for a song,” she said. “So the natural thing to do at the end of the tour was to go to my apartment and put ’em on tape.”

Then Hurricane Katrina came along.

“I was lucky on many fronts,” DiFranco says. Her apartment is on the third floor in the largely unaffected French Quarter, so the damage was limited to one broken window. Also, “we had someplace to go” — DiFranco’s house in her hometown of Buffalo. “There was a lot of upheaval, but a lot of alternatives for us. … So I ended up in Buffalo saying ‘Hmm, I guess I’ll make a record here.’ ”

But she’d left most of her equipment and instruments in New Orleans. All that was left in Buffalo were a few cheap keyboards.

Back to work.

“I think the folksinger in me likes parameters, like ‘Here’s a guitar and a microphone — make a show,’ or ‘Here’s a synth and an omnichord — make a record.’ Too many choices are daunting. …

“The album has a real organic base: two people playing instruments and me singing a song. And then around that, partly due to the tools I had at hand and partly due to consciousness right now and my reaction to my culture, there’s a lot of sounds of technology wafting around this organic core. Just lots of bleeping and burping and weird sounds, this intrusion of technology on our natural lives. …

“The way that I’ve made my career is just traveling around making music for people. Just setting up in the corner of a bar and playing.”

THE DiFRANCO lyrical rapier is still there, tossing barbs at the government and the structure of society, as well as providing an example someone determined to be self-determined. “I ain’t in the best shape / That I’ve ever been in/ But I know where I’m going/ And it ain’t where I’ve been,” she sings in “Subconscious.” In “Decree,” she declares that “The stars are going out/ And the stripes are getting bent” as “everywhere fools are squinting into microscopes/ Researching cells/ Trying to figure out a way/ We can all live in hell.”

And since her music has always taken on the political as well as the personal, “Millennium Theater” rails against “Halliburton, Enron/ Chief justices for sale/ …Patriarchies realign/ While the ice caps melt/ And New Orleans bides her time/ Welcome to the show/ … Please turn off your cell phones/ And forget what you think you know.”

Like all the songs on Reprieve, it was written before Katrina, but it still resonates. Since returning to New Orleans, DiFranco has said elsewhere that “I don’t think Mother Nature was responsible for most of the devastation. Those levees were not built right, nor were they maintained. … There have been a lot of people in FEMA and the state and local government lining their pockets for a lot of years preparing for nothing, and the poor people of New Orleans paid the price.”

The centerpiece of the album however, is the title track, with a mostly spoken lyric that calls for not just a rearranging but a reimagining: “Oh to grow up blindfolded/ A man’s world in your little girl’s head/ …In my body I hold the secret recipe/ Of precisely what life is for/ And the patriarchy that looks to shame me for it/ Is the same one making war.” At the end, she declares that in an age where nuclear weapons are everywhere, “feminism ain’t about equality/ It’s about reprieve.”

SPEAKING LAST WEEK, before the election, DiFranco said the problems run deeper than the question of which party is in control of Congress.

“The source of our social diseases, it’s not as simple as just patriarchy, but it’s much bigger than we’re admitting to ourselves. And I’m not talking about plugging women into the system [because there are women in the system], just like you have men who are agents of feminism.

“So it’s more complex than women and men; it’s about female sensibility being infused in the government and culture, and really being respected and honored and included. It’s about consciousness shift. And that’s a big one to tackle.”

This is DiFranco’s first tour in a while, and also her last: She’s seven months pregnant. (The baby’s father is Mike Napolitano, engineer of Reprieve.) “This last string of dates is definitely going to be daunting,” DiFranco said. “It’s going to be belly versus guitar.”

So after this tour is over, the baby is the new project. As for returning to the studio and the road, “I’m just going to play it by ear. I’ll be home playing full-time sow for a while, and then I hope to tackle some projects at home.”

In addition to a new record, she says this might be the right time to write and release a book of poetry that has been in the air for years.

But basically, she’ll go with the flow. “I don’t know how the pace of my life will play out after that. We’ll see.”

Ani DiFranco plays at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel, 79 Washington St., Providence, Saturday night at 7:30. Tickets are $34; call (401) 331-5876 or go to www.etix.com.