'AND I MUST admit / Today my inner pessimist / Seems to have got the best of me," sing-speaks Ani DiFranco in the middle of "Serpentine," the 10-minute epic song-poem on her new album, Evolve. And if that doesn't resonate in the sour marrow of your own culturally/politically induced depression, then continue duct-taping your windows, programming your TiVo to catch the Joe Millionaire sequel, and talking amongst yourselves while the clear-cutting of everything from Head Start to pension plans continues unabated outside your little plastic castle. Meanwhile, DiFranco will try to figure out how to cope when "Pavlov hits me with more bad news / Every time I answer the phone."

That's what Evolve is about – coming to terms with the sense of dislocation induced by waking up in a world in which numbing down is the logical, indeed prescribed, response to not-so-random acts of meanness. In old-fashioned terms, it's about the personalization of the political ("Sitting slightly outside society / At odds with its odd offerings," she sings on "Here for Now") and vice versa ("Did you tell your mom you carpet bombed / Before you left here," she asks on "Shrug"). It's about what you do when the romantic rug and social safety net are pulled out from under you simultaneously.

One afternoon last week I sat in the car for an hour and listened closely to Evolve. As with many albums from DiFranco's prodigious output, I hadn't really gotten it on first listen. With no distractions ("My distraction's my defense / Against a lack of inspiration," she confesses on "Phase"), the CD's 12 songs spoke increasingly directly to the ambivalent feelings that compete for my attention in this season of sweet-smelling freesias and rattling sabers. At first the impact was purely musical. Played by a rhythm section of Julie Wolf, on all manner of keyboards, bassist Jason Mercer, and drummer Daren Hahn; a four-person horn section; and DiFranco on electric and acoustic guitars, the music takes what Tim Buckley was after in the early '70s – a fusion of folk rock with jazz and R&B – to a new pinnacle. Too much of an arranging freak to go for the same kind of open-ended improvisation Buckley attempted, DiFranco throws in a touch of Latin pop and a whole lot of off-kilter harmonies that would sound at home on a Sex Mob or Dave Douglas recording.

Of course, just as I arrive to praise DiFranco's band, she decides to bury it and return to the solo guitar-and-voice "little folksinger" format she used for "Evolve" and "Serpentine" and in which she's currently touring, as if she's concerned that what she has to say might be eclipsed by the context in which she says it.

So, gradually unpacking DiFranco's idiosyncratic syllabic formations and phrasing, I began to latch onto key phrases and parse out recurring themes in Evolve. In the opening track, "Promised Land," she sings, "So she lifts her chin and squints at me / To assess what I think I know"; in "Slide," "Cuz when I look at you I squint / You are that beautiful." We squint to make things clearer, either literally in our vision or figuratively in our minds, or to filter out the glare of too bright a light. Evolve is an inventory of blurs necessitating squints: "The further the horizon / The more it holds my gaze / And the foreground's out of focus" ("Phase"); "Your face / So close / It's out / Of focus" ("O My My"); "I don't take good pictures / Cuz I have the kind of beauty / That moves" ("Evolve").

A squint isn't that far removed from a wince – as in "She was wincing like something brittle trying hard to bend" ("Slide") – and sometimes we wince at the discomfort of sharpening our perception through a squint. But that doesn't mean we have to recoil or retreat. We may "keep imagining that pretty soon [we] will just disappear ... looking for the little red x next to the red arrow / And the words 'you are here' " ("Here for Now"). We may be like the protagonist of "Second Intermission," who admits with regret, "I'm always trying to get there / I never really get there / To that quiet place where I accept myself." We might find our lives taking place on "the precipice between groundlessness and flight" ("Welcome to:"), but DiFranco insists we face up to our situation. In so many words and in so many ways, she argues that seeing things as they really are is the beginning of the path out of pessimism.