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"I’m not sure what I expected when I asked Joe to co-produce the album," she admits, "but as it turns out, Joe was a producer in sort of the old-fashioned sense. Prior to the recording sessions, he was the one making the phone calls, crunching the numbers, and bringing in the musicians and engineers, mostly from the dream team he’s assembled out in LA. It felt like the old time Motown days when the producer would put together the band and the artist would come in and they would make a record. But when we got into studio, I sort of took over my half of the co-producing. I worked with the band on arrangements."

DiFranco’s collaboration with Henry came at the right time in her evolution. Although she did begin her career with a guitar and her voice, she had been exploring jazzy grooves with horn arrangements in songs that played down the central role of the guitar. Now, as she prepares to go on the road with her guitar and just one back-up musician, DiFranco’s æsthetic appears to have come full circle. "Oh, yeah, I was the one saying, ‘Let’s turn the guitar up.’ I’m once again in a space where I feel that the songs live in the guitar, and in the past, there was a time when I downplayed that."

Despite her return to the guitar, she didn’t write any songs with Henry, and his role in the recording wasn’t exactly what she had expected. "When I invited Joe and envisioned this whole new concept of co-producing, I think I was expecting more of a creative-collaboration-in-the-minute type thing," she says, reaching for a way to describe their working relationship. "But, ah, well, we would record a take of a song and there would just be silence. Then we’d do a couple more, and I’d walk into the booth and say, ‘I like take three. . . .’ And we’d go with that. I guess that when I go into the studio to make a record, it’s bound to come out sounding like my record, even if there’s a new team assembled to record with. But the sound of the record has a lot to do with the creative exchange between me and the band and then the engineer and the mixer, who were all Joe’s people. And they have a signature way of recording, especially the drums — all of those big, dark, mysterious compressed drum sounds. And the film noir kind of piano. So I came in with my music and sensibility, and they had theirs, and we met in the middle."

The biggest challenge for DiFranco seems to have been relocating to LA to make the album and then sticking to the schedule that Henry had plotted. "Making a record in six days, which not only meant nailing them to tape but also teaching them to the band, wasn’t easy. And I also wasn’t used to going home every day at a terribly decent hour." She laughs. "So maybe if we did it again, I’d insist we work more on the chick singer’s schedule."

IF HENRY IS INTERESTED in another production project with a female singer-songwriter, he need look no farther than the Anti- roster, where he’ll find an up-and-coming artist with deep roots in noirish blues, a fondness for dark-textured recordings, and a promising new album titled Escondida. Her name is Jolie Holland, and she’s playing T.T. the Bear’s Place this Sunday. "Anti- were looking to sign a female artist, and they heard my first album," the 29-year-old Holland recounts when I catch her on her cell phone in a van as she makes her way to Nashville on tour. "So I became the first girl on the same label as Nick Cave and Tom Waits and all those other people." Indeed, there’s a gothic, cabaret sensibility that parallels Cave’s in the jazzy arrangement of "Mad Tom of Bedlam," a traditional British folk song Holland recorded for Escondida, and a taste of Waits in the broken blues of "Old Fashion Morphine," a song Holland says is inspired by two old gospel songs she found, "Old Time Religion" and "Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning."

Holland is a relatively recent convert to old-time jazz and blues, but you can tell she’s been a quick study. "It wasn’t until 1996 that I hit the road and met a lot of people who were listening to older music. That was a big year. I heard Nick Drake, Elizabeth Cotten, Blind Willie McTell, Mississippi John Hurt, Neil Young. I heard Clarence Ashley for the first time that year, and I got into American music really deeply. And a lot of the stuff that I’m into goes back to the 1800s."

That may seem far-fetched, but one of the tunes on Escondida, "Faded Coat of Blue," dates back to the American Civil War. "It’s a song from the 1860s that a friend of mine sent it to me on a mix tape. I don’t know who wrote it. It’s just a traditional song mourning the loss of family member to the Civil War."

Holland, who tours with a drummer and a guitar player, claims to be a musical neophyte. But she’s blessed with an instinctive feel for jazzy vocal intonations and an adventurous sensibility when it comes to instrumentation: she recently picked up a three-string cigar-box guitar that’s become an integral part of her show, along with the guitar and the violin that she plays live. There’s nothing studied about her approach to the roots music she’s developed an affinity for. And if she has any concept of how unusual her musical æsthetic is, it’s only in the broadest sense. "I’ve always been conscious about trying to make a niche for myself as a writer and to make sure what I’m doing has some value. So in that sense, I guess I knew that what I was doing was unusual when I started playing this music."

Jolie Holland performs this Sunday, February 6, at T.T. the Bear’s Place, 10 Brookline Street in Central Square; call (617) 492-BEAR. Ani DiFranco plays the Orpheum, 1 Hamilton Place in Boston, on April 29; call (617) 931-2000.