At 12 years of age, most children are at home on a Monday night. But Carrie Rodriguez wasn’t like most 12-year-olds.

At that tender age, Rodriguez could often be spotted at La Gona Rosa in her hometown of Austin, Texas, on Monday nights, backing her singer-songwriter father, David Rodriguez, on fiddle.

“I remember my mother getting after me because it was a school night,” said Rodriguez, now 29, during a phone interview from Brooklyn, where she now lives. “She kept threatening to come down there and make me come home earlier.”

The small nightclub offered the young violinist her first opportunity to break out of classical, which she began playing at age 5, and into the world of bluegrass and folk music. In fact, at that point Rodriguez didn’t know how to play fiddle music at all.

“I was pretty much a classical musician,” Rodriguez said. “[My father] would have to write out my parts for me, because I didn’t know how to play fiddle.”

Rodriguez has since come a long way from those initial forays into fiddling, with past credits including a stint at Berklee College of Music in Boston and three duet albums with Chip Taylor, the songwriter behind the ’60s hit “Wild Thing.” In 2006, she stepped out on her own with her solo debut, “Seven Angels and a Bicycle.” Her second solo album, “She Ain’t Me,” was released on Aug. 11, and the supporting tour, which began on Aug. 26, will take her to WAMC’s Linda Norris Auditorium at 8 p.m. Thursday.

When Rodriguez spoke with The Gazette, however, she was half an hour away from boarding a plane to Spain, not for an international leg of her tour, but for her only vacation of the year. Otherwise, she’s been on tour since the beginning of June.

“That’s normally what I’m doing, but this is the exception; it feels good, actually,” Rodriguez said.

New role

Despite the fact that “She Ain’t Me” is Rodriguez’s sophomore effort, she is still just getting comfortable in her role as a solo artist.

“The songwriting thing is pretty new for me; even singing is still kind of new,” Rodriguez said. “I came from being a sideman to doing all of this stuff, and I feel I’m still finding myself a little bit.”

Although she said the transition from backing instrumentalist to singer-songwriter was natural, it was never Rodriguez’s goal. She first began singing with Taylor, who asked her to sing harmony on some songs.

“I had never done any singing; I never thought it was a good idea,” Rodriguez said. “He needed harmony, and I was excited about the gig. That led to duets, writing songs and making the first solo record.”

“She Ain’t Me” finds Rodriguez taking the reins even more than on her debut CD, which primarily featured songs by Taylor. This time around, Rodriguez wrote or co-wrote 10 of the 11 songs on “She Ain’t Me,” working with Dan Wilson, Mary Gauthier and Gary Louris.

“In many ways, it feels to me like my first real solo record,” Rodriguez said. “The ‘Seven Angels’ album was pretty much a joint project with Chip Taylor, who did a lot of writing; I had four or five co-writes. Coming out of the duet project together, in a lot of ways I still had the same approach. This record is definitely more Carrie.”

According to Rodriguez, working with new songwriters allowed her to “dig a little deeper.” Gauthier, whom Rodriguez met while on tour with Taylor, was a natural choice of songwriting partners. Their collaboration yielded one of Rodriguez’s favorite songs on the album, “Absence.”

“The day we got together was a depressing, stormy day; I was in New York City, and [Gauthier] happened to be in the city playing a gig,” Rodriguez said. “I came to her with an idea, a concept, a melody on the fiddle and a few lines. Watching her work with lyrics — we basically wrote that tune in one day, [but] she would send me e-mails every day, making me do changes. [She would write], ‘I took out a word here, an do you think it’s better this way?’ ”

In contrast, Rodriguez had never met Louris before they collaborated. However, their partnership also flowed easily, Rodriguez said.

“The second we started, it felt completely comfortable,” Rodriguez said. “We would start working, we each had a notebook, and we might sit in the same room for two hours not speaking, just writing lyrics, and then sharing them after those two hours were up.”

Early influences

Although Rodriguez might be new to songwriting, influences such as Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zandt and Lucinda Williams helped point Rodriguez in the right direction.

“I grew up listening to some pretty heavy-duty songwriters because of my dad,” Rodriguez said. “I remember, he gave me a Leonard Cohen tape when I was 10 years old and said, ‘Well, you may not like this now, but later you’ll appreciate it,’ and it was true. I hated it when I first put it on, but a few years later put it on again and I loved it.”

The resulting album finds Rodriguez opening up her sound into the realms of alternative and pop songwriting, while still maintaining a solid footing in the traditional bluegrass and country she started out playing with Taylor. Songs like the title track feature galloping country rhythms married to a meandering pop hook, while “Absence” showcases Rodriguez’s fiddle playing in a more traditional, laid-back groove.

However, only three tracks on the album feature fiddle. For much of the album, Rodriguez plays four-string tenor guitars tuned in fifths, like a violin, or her “Mandobird,” an electric mandolin shaped like a Gibson Firebird guitar.

“When I started writing more songs, in the beginning I would just write tunes on the violin, and it started to feel limiting,” Rodriguez said. “It was hard to strum chords and hear the full chord. I wanted to strum it like a rhythm instrument, and that doesn’t necessarily carry.”

On tour, Rodriguez plays all three instruments, leading a four-piece band including guitar, drums, bass and keyboards. According to Rodriguez, she has no plans to go back to her original goal of “[playing] fiddle with somebody great.”

“Now, it would be hard to go back and just be a sideman,” Rodriguez said. “I don’t know if it would be fulfilling in this point in my life.”