DOWN TIME: “I thought a lot about what the gift has given, and what it’s taken away.”

It’s always an inspiring moment when an artist goes independent, breaks from the major-label corporate structure, and joins the brave new world of DIY. It’s a less inspiring moment when the same artist collapses from exhaustion a few years later.

Melissa Ferrick has been around the block a few times by now. Twelve years ago she was a wiry, intense folk-rocker just out of her teens, writing lacerating songs about tragic relationships, tearing her vocal cords on every tune, and scaring the pants off as many audience members as she attracted. With the help of some influential fans — including Morrissey, who had the unsigned Ferrick open a tour — she went straight to the majors and released Massive Blur (Atlantic, 1993), a fully electric album that caught much of the early intensity.

She hasn’t rested a lot in the interim; for the last few years she’s largely run her own career and released her own music. The albums have chronicled some of her personal changes: she came out as a lesbian early in her career, broke with drugs and alcohol a few years later, and went through a stormy relationship or two (2000’s Freedom, her most explicit album, may well be her best). The new In the Eyes of Strangers is her eighth studio album and 11th overall, and her sixth release on her own Right On label.

On the surface, not too much has changed. Ferrick’s urgent singing and percussive acoustic guitar style remain recognizable, and tortured love songs are still a specialty (when she writes a hopeful one, like this album’s opener “Never Give Up,” she tends to get it out of the way early). Look closely, however, and it sounds very much like a transitional record. She’s written self-depreciating lyrics before, but never quite as pointedly as on “Stuck” (“Everybody look at the folk singer, waiting on the love of her life. Come on and need me!”). “Rest Now” marks the first time she’s written about losing a friend — in this case the late singer/songwriter Chris Whitley, who she got to know on tour. And the subject of rest also comes up in the final track, “It’s Been a Long Time,” which is about catching one’s breath for the first time in years. Ferrick also wrote that one from experience, having cut a tour short last year when exhaustion caught up with her.

“I would always hear the stories that so-and-so got hospitalized from exhaustion, and I always thought it was bullshit,” she said recently from her home in Ipswich. “Then my body gave out. I was touring so extensively that I got walking pneumonia, and went to the hospital in a high fever. My mind was fine but my body was killing me everywhere.” Forced off the road, she found herself confronting a bunch of large issues at once. “I spent a lot of time being sad and depressed. Having those kinds of thoughts: why am I doing this? Do I want to settle down and have a kid?”

She even started to wonder whether she was in the wrong business. “It gets pretty isolating when you’re working 16 hours a day. In this job you’re giving all the time, and yet it’s a pretty selfish job — selfish and selfless at the same time. I must have played on every birthday I’ve had in the past 10 years, and spent however many Christmases at Denny’s. So it’s easy to get stuck in that headspace of, ‘I need more, what about me?’ Yet I’m getting to do what I’ve always wanted to do. So I thought a lot about what the gift has given, and what it’s taken away.”

That taking-stock mood informs the majority of the new disc’s lyrics, but the music is some of the most polished she’s made. It’s as studio-polished as Massive Blur, but here producer Ethan Johns accents the melodies instead of the rough edges. Her regular bandmates (drummer Daren Hahn and keyboardist Julie Wolf) are joined by guest singers Tegan Quinn and Erin McKeown. Although it’s so far been ignored by River-type radio stations — a fact that irks Ferrick somewhat — it’s as commercial as anything she’s done.

Ferrick admits that she hasn’t sorted her issues yet, and isn’t sure where she’s going from here. It seems a safe bet, however, that the next decade of her career will be less hectic than the last one has been. And that the less characteristic songs on the new album, the non-relationship songs, will become the norm. “The more years go by, the less interested I am in breaking up with people so I can feel something. Sure, I’ve done that. I don’t drink or do drugs, so I don’t have those things to provoke some enormous feeling. Lately I’ve been focused on trying to write something everyday, more focused on getting inside — more dream writing, more existential thinking, more about viewing the world instead of just talking about my own effect on it. Life is about what you can give, it’s that fucking simple.”

But for all the soul-searching she’s done in her lyrics, her best-known song remains the one about sex. “Drive” was a last-minute addition to the Freedom album, written under the influence of some Janet Jackson albums; neither she nor the label owner were initially sure whether to release it. But it’s become the closing song at most of her shows, the one most likely to draw screams from the girls and a few of the guys (the line about tying her partner up usually does the trick). But since Ferrick usually writes from the heart, it may seem odd that her greatest hit stems from a somewhat lower region. “I’m in a pretty good place with that song. Now that I’m touring with the band I feel more protected onstage. I always thought it was a stupid song to play solo; I mean, it’s three fucking notes. I’m not surprised that one gets so much focus; sex sells and that’s nothing new — I’d be happy if Madonna covered it, or Britney Spears. And if that song gets people in the door, maybe seven out of 10 will hear something else as well.”