Hurricane Katrina interrupted the making of Ani DiFranco's 18th full-length studio album, which she started recording in early 2005.

She was forced to evacuate her New Orleans studio and leave her master recordings behind. However, she drove back to get them three days after the levees broke and returned to her home studio in Buffalo, N.Y., to finish the album with whatever instruments were available.

Forced to improvise, DiFranco used a "cheesy synthesizer" to overdub nearly the entire record, she said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

The result is "Reprieve," 13 powerful and political tracks — exactly what the self-proclaimed "Little Folksinger" is best at creating.

"Reprieve" opens with an ascending, scattered bassline. The first song, "Hypnotized," is serene with bursts of electric guitar backed by slow piano. It's slower than expected for the opening track of a DiFranco album, but it works.

The tracks have a flow that makes sense, instead of 13 random tracks thrown onto a CD.

Even though the album starts out mellow, it begins to pick up by the fifth song, "Decree," which is the first in a string of the best four songs on the album.

It starts and ends with a pump organ and what sounds like separated handclaps, with a synthesizer used during most of the song.

"Decree" is one of many DiFranco songs that criticizes the media, with a chorus ranting about the news channels showing the same black-and-white 90-second segments over and over again, while the whole country is getting warped.

The next track, "78% H20," is upbeat with a walking bassline, steady guitar melody and sparks of synthesizer tossed into the background.

"Millennium Theater," placed directly in the middle of the album, is one of the most effective of the 13 tracks. The politically charged song starts with a piano and synthesizer, giving it a futuristic feel that fits its title. DiFranco's voice is doubled over to achieve almost an echoing effect.

Near the end of the song, DiFranco sings, "Trickle down pollution/Patriarchies realign/While the ice caps melt/And New Orleans bides her time."

It's ironic that she wrote the song months before Katrina, but in a Rolling Stone interview, she said that it was "a rant about the spectacle, as opposed to what's really happening underneath."

Track eight, "Half-assed," has a simple but strong melody that showcases DiFranco's smooth, alto voice. Again, DiFranco expresses her discomfort with U.S. society, longing to feel how she really feels instead of what the billboards suggest.

The song is about looking for a true moment of beauty in order to forget about all the falsities elsewhere else in the world.

Following the upbeat core of the album is the title track, which is the only spoken-word piece. It is emotionally powerful, part of it referencing Hiroshima and a lone eucalyptus tree that was "one of the very few lives that survived and lives on" after the atomic bomb explosion.

A photograph of the tree, taken on Aug. 10, 1945, just hours after the disaster, inspired the cover art for the album.

The poem talks about growing up blind in a man's world, trying to shake yourself away from being "hypnotized."

DiFranco says that the patriarchy that shames women is the same one that creates war, and that if women need to split their personalities in two to survive, they are not free.

She says that from her appearance to her facial expressions, "All I really own is me."

The end of the poem transitions into "A Spade," a gentle waltz with a steady bassline keeping the time. DiFranco experiments with different time signatures at different points in the song.

"Reprieve" returns back to how it started and slows down for the last few tracks.

The 12th track, "Shroud," is one of the most stripped-down songs on the album, focusing mostly on DiFranco's soft and steady acoustic guitar.

She sings about what people can start to notice once they get rid of the mask they're hiding behind.

Finishing the album is "Reprise," a dramatic instrumental piece that fades to nothing.

Even though it is different from DiFranco's previous releases, the album is beautiful and honest.

It is best summed up by the title track's last line: "Feminism isn't about equality, it's about reprieve."