Carrie Rodriguez [ tickets ], a Texas born singer/songwriter and fiddle player, is celebrating the recent release of her second album, "She Ain't Me," with a sweeping US tour.

[Click here to view video footage of Carrie Rodriguez's exclusive LiveDaily Sessions performance.]

LiveDaily contributor Maya Marin recently spoke to Rodriquez about her new album, her fantasy collaborators, and much more.

You grew up in Austin in a very musical household. Your father is David Rodriguez, who is a famed folk singer. What type of music did you grow up listening to?

My mother is actually an opera buff, so we had a lot of opera blasting through the speakers. She's also a painter, and when she was painting at home, she'd be listening to opera all day long, so there was a lot of that in the house. I also used to go through her old record collection and steal her records and play them. She had a lot of great singer/songwriters from the '70s—a lot of Joni Mitchell stuff, of course all the Beatles albums. So singer/songwriters and opera—that's what I listened to.

Was there any expectation in the house, spoken or unspoken, that you would grow up to be a musician?

Well, I certainly expected to grow up and be a musician. It was really cool because, since my mother's an artist and my dad's a musician, no one ever told me that it was a problem to be musician as a profession. No one ever said, "That's bad." A lot of my musician friends had a hard time growing up with their parents wanting them to go to law school and stuff like that. I chose to play the violin when I was five years old. It wasn't like my parents were forcing it on me. They were always just happy if I was happy and [they were] encouraging about it.

If I remember your bio correctly, it said you chose the violin because of Itzhak Perlman. You'd seen him perform.

Yeah, that was very inspirational. My mom took me to see him play when I was five years old and I remember being completely mesmerized by him and sitting in the front row and, in fact, he was doing some kind of encore, like a Paganini Caprice or something really fancy, and I got so excited that in the middle of the piece I stood up and started clapping when you weren't supposed to stand up and clap. He looked down at me and smiled though. When I was watching him, though, I remember thinking back then that that's what I wanted to do with my life.

So then you took classical violin lessons …

I did.

and you didn't get your first taste of performing popular music until you got that invitation from Lyle Lovett to play with him?

Yeah, although I actually played a little bit in my teens with my father, who is a singer/songwriter. I'd go play in clubs in Austin, but I wasn't good at improvising. I didn't really know how to play that style of music. He, in fact, would have to write out lines for me to play with his songs. That first time Lyle invited me to his show was my first year in college. I was at a music conservatory called Oberlin and he played in Cleveland that night and invited me out. He's an old friend of my father's. I sat in with his band; he was playing with his Large Band, which is just an incredible band, and it was time for me to take a solo and I kind of ate it. I was really not, at that time, good at playing that style of music, but then I watched his show and watched his fabulous fiddle player and, by the end of the night, I thought to myself, "Man, I want to be able to do what she's doing and I don’t think I want to play in a symphony for the rest of my life." That's when I made the change.

That cemented it and that's also when you switched from Oberlin to Berklee College of Music?

Right. I just started investigating where I could study popular styles on the violin and they had a string department that taught jazz theory and just basic improvising skills as well as fiddle styles, so I had to leave Texas and go to Boston to learn how to play the fiddle, if you can believe it.

Did you have to study jazz theory and jazz fiddle as well?

I did, yeah. I'm not too good at that, I must admit, but I did study it.

You met the famed producer Chip Taylor. I believe he saw you when you were playing an in-store gig.

Right. That was right after music school and I was back in Austin at South by Southwest Music Festival. He saw me playing fiddle with a band and got my number and started calling me for gigs to play fiddle, which soon turned into doing some singing with him as well.

Did you know right away that you were a good creative match?

Well, I was thrilled to get this gig because, after that experience of playing with Lyle Lovett, that really became my goal—to just get a gig with a great songwriter, backing him up being their fiddle player. So, right out of music school, getting that gig with Chip was very exciting. I didn't have any idea it would lead to singing. I'd never even tried to sing before and pretty soon he had me singing harmony and then singing duets with him and then, later, writing with him and making these duet albums. That was just a very unexpected turn.

Now you're set to release your second album, "She Ain't Me." Did Chip also produce this, like he did your debut?

No. This has been a departure for me. I actually didn't do any writing with Chip for this album, which was hard, because Chip is an incredible songwriter. He's written some of our biggest hits of all time, like "Wild Thing." Working with him was kind of like my comfort zone, writing with him. I just felt like. for this album. I wanted to find out a little bit more about myself as a writer and take myself out of that comfort zone, so, as hard as it was, I did a lot of writing on my own and with some new friends—Gary Louris of the band The Jayhawks, we did four or five songs together. I wrote a song with Mary Gauthier as well as Dan Wilson from Semisonic. It was a good growing experience for me.

How do you feel this album differs thematically or production wise from the first?

Thematically, it is very autobiographical, more so than my first album, because, on the first album, Chip wrote a lot of the songs himself for me to sing and we co-wrote four of them. On this one, I'm writing on every one of them except for one song. This year has been a very introspective year for me. My husband's a musician as well and we're both off touring separately most of the time, so he would be in, like, El Salvador—he plays with a Spanish pop singer …

Which is where the song "El Salvador" came from!

Exactly. While I'm freezing my butt off in Milwaukee in February! So, just dealing with distance and separation—I think you hear that a lot on this album. Production-wise, it's very different. I got a producer named Malcolm Burn to produce it. I've been a fan of his for years. He produced Emmylou Harris's "Red Dirt Girl," which won a Grammy, and he worked a lot with Daniel Lanois. It's got a very full band sound. Malcolm's playing a lot of piano on it. It's more rockin'.

Since your collaboration with Chip was such a success, do you think that maybe in the future you'd consider doing another collaboration with another artist and, if so, who are some of your fantasy collaborators?

Wow. That's a cool question and no one's ever asked me that. I'd have to say—and she's singing on my new record—Lucinda Williams; she's singing on one track. It would be pretty cool to do something with her. She's one of my absolute favorite songwriters and singers, and she's just a beautiful person. I got to open up for her last year for about a month. I'd love to do something with her. I don't know—I feel like I'm already getting to collaborate with a lot of people that I would have dreamt of working with. It's really cool. Like working and writing with Mary Gauthier—she's also a great female singer/songwriter.