Singer/songwriter Joanne Rand has released nine albums prior to her new CD, Snake Oil and Hummingbirds, but this one's a bit different.

"I wrote the songs during the three years I was studying music composition up at HSU, so I was able to write scores for the string parts, and the horn parts and the percussion," said Rand, calling from Florida where she was visiting family for Thanksgiving. "I've always heard the arrangements in my head, but this time I was able to flesh them out and they became richer and more complex. I hired a cellist and a violinist and had them read from the 25-page score. I learned a lot on the process."

She was also able to rework her piano parts with her professor, Brian Post. "He helped me become more sophisticated as a composer, so overall the work is more crafted. In the past I was more groove oriented; this time, with his help, I'd put piano solos in the arrangements and things like that."

While the end result is less folky than her previous work, she's still drawing on deep folk roots and included her takes on traditional songs like "Shady Grove," "Maid of Constant Sorrow" and the stand-out, "Shenandoah."

"I always loved Aaron Copeland's 'Appalachian Spring'  - it's folk music, but with an orchestral treatment," she said. "And I've been looking at these songs that have lasted for centuries. They're deep, very deep."

Rand's reworkings often take the songs in different directions. Her "Shenandoah" has new verses expanding the story into an allegory about the culture clash between Native Americans and white settlers.

"I always wondered who Shenandoah was: Was it a woman or was it the river?" she explained. "I looked up all the traditional lyrics, then came up with my own interpretation. To me it was about a young white man who fell in love with an Indian maiden. Her father forbade her marriage and that was the beginning of the end. I wondered what would have happened if that marriage had taken place. The second half of my version explores what that would have led to, along with the plundering of the land and the people and all that."

Rand's work has always drawn on social and political issues. The new album maintains that trend. "I can't help myself," she says with a laugh. "I have deep emotions about the world and what going on in it and I write about those. I also write about the transformations in my own life, about the journey of being human. It's about all the emotions and while it's sometime political, it's always from the gut and from the heart."

Joanne Rand celebrates the release of Snake Oil and Hummingbirds with a show at Redwood Raks Dance Studio in the Old Creamery Building on Friday, Dec. 2, sharing the event with blues guitarist David Jacobs-Strain, who is about the release a new album of his own, Terrapin Angel**. Tickets are $13 at the door; $10 in advance. Proceeds benefit the Siskiyou Land Conservancy. Doors open at 7 p.m., music starts at 8. For further information call 498-4900.