Last year Ani DiFranco released "Binary," the 19th studio album in a storied musical career. When DiFranco comes to White Eagle Hall in Jersey City on June 12, it will be as part of her "Rise Up" tour.

One of her partners on the tour is EMILY's List, a political action committee dedicated to helping get women candidates elected to office who are pro-choice -- a part of their vision for "a government that reflects the people it serves," according to their website.

"For me, the whole EMILY's List thing is about inclusion," DiFranco tells The Jersey Journal. "It's about democracy as a verb, this thing we have to keep doing to make it real. I've been encouraging people to vote and exercise their franchise for many years. I think voting is so essential to living in a living democracy, and also EMILY's List goes one step further -- to encouraging candidacy."

DiFranco, who is on the EMILY's List creative council, says that in addition to voting people should consider running for office themselves.

"Maybe the good-old boys aren't the only ones who have what it takes to be in these political and legislative and judicial positions,'' she says. "We should participate on every level, and so of course (EMILY's List is) focused on getting more women infused into the political spectrum, which I think is super key to the diversification process."

As has become customary for DiFranco, "Binary" mixes blues, rock and jazz elements with the style that's her cornerstone – folk.

Opening for DiFranco at the June 12 show will be Haley Heynderickx, a folk artist whose debut album dropped in early March.

"I'm always asking people for recommendations, and I really liked this gal," says DiFranco, whose own musical career began in the folk underground.

"My first musical mentor was a songwriter and folk singer in Buffalo, N.Y., and he sort of taught me the beginnings of my job. And as I sort of started getting out into the world more, it was on the folk circuit – at these sort of coffeehouses and folk venues and folk festivals.

"There's a whole kind of world of folk and roots music out there, and it's a beautiful, diverse world. And it's sustaining, too. There are many musicians and writers and performers that exist solely on that circuit, and you can make a living there, doing your art.

That is what DiFranco did for years, she says, before her music hit the pop zeitgeist.

"I'm still a folk singer at heart, I guess,'' she says. "And even though, my musical adventurings -- I have very big ears, so to speak, and I like to listen to a lot of different kinds of music and everything I hear and do and move through influences me. So, the sound of my music has mutated and fluctuated, but at my core I come from a community where music and art and social activism and community-mindedness and political and social commentary – all of these things are connected, and all of these things work together. I know they certainly do inside me."

One of the songs on "Binary" that's a fine example of this is "Pacifist's Lament," which may seem self-explanatory, but pacifism can be a hard concept to grasp.

DiFranco explains:

"Life is an ongoing battle of opposing forces and differing opinions and different truths butting up against each other. ... Nonviolent communication is the best path. But of course we all know from our personal lives and our marriages and our boyfriends and our girlfriends and our mothers and our fathers that this is hard stuff.

"It's really hard," she says, "to find the humility and to step out of your self and your own perspective and your need to be right and your need to be seen and heard – and allow another truth, allow an opposing force to work on you, allow a difference of opinion, to respect that there are a multiplicity of truths in this world, and that doesn't mean that any of them are more or less true. ... So that song is a meditation on pacifism and the work of trying to apply it on every level -- and seeing the resonance of all of those levels."

For many people, one of life's many ongoing battles is with a sense of isolation.

"Carry You Around," a song on one of DiFranco's earlier albums, has a few lines about loneliness that may also speak to why so many people embrace tribalism:

"Imagine what loneliness / will drive someone to do / now multiply that times me/and multiply that times you."

"Just to riff on that," DiFranco says, "so much of you know where we go wrong in our society stems from really just our basic human need to belong to something and oftentimes our need to belong to something is so great I feel that it completely clouds our rationality or our ability to be logical and discern even something like right or wrong because you need your tribe more than you need right and wrong. ...

"For instance, on the left we are so often caught in the trap of trying to convince people on the far right that they are wrong and to enlighten them to a truth they are not seeing. But what we don't understand is that what we're really asking them is to abandon their tribe, to abandon their community, to abandon everything that they know and everyone that holds them, so that's a very, very lot to ask of somebody. It's just so way deeper that a matter of 'change your idea about something.' It's 'step into the abyss' ...

"We can't ask people to abandon their community," she says. "We can only give them a new and better community, so it really is about reaching out with open hand to your opponent and recognizing that human need to belong is in the forefront of our subconscious and that our conscious mind can't just override that necessarily."

If you go

DiFranco plays White Eagle Hall, 337 Newark Ave., Jersey City on Tuesday, June 12. Doors open at 7 p.m.; the show starts at 8 p.m. Show is 18 and over. Tickets are $32.50 to $50 and can be bought on ticketfly.