Mary Chapin Carpenter, Ashes and Roses, review Country-folk singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter has been through a lot in the past five years. In 2007, she cut short a tour because of a sharp pain in her chest that turned out to be a pulmonary embolism. Since then, she went through a divorce and her father passed away. So her 12th album is a record of loss. "It's about the journey," she said in a recent interview. What it feels like to let go, to address grief, to feel that emptiness. To not be afraid to feel that emptiness. We spend a lot of our energy pushing things away, because it's too painful. It's about the place you get to when you can no longer push it away; you have to go through it. Reflecting that journey, the mostly acoustic album opens with a gentle traveller's tale. Transcendental Reunion finds the singer on an aeroplane at night - detached from the busy, twinkling world below, then queuing in the impersonal banality of the arrivals hall. There's envy for those met by outstretched arms and dry humour in her weary prayer at the baggage carousel before she heads into the day. The melody is based on the simple, repeated rise and fall of a seven-note phrase, backed at a laid back strummed and picked pace. To be honest, it's quite hard to tell apart from many of the other meditative, mid-tempo, mum-rock songs on the record. And yet all command attention because of Chapin Carpenter's warm, weathered, unshowily authentic voice which has a kind of peace at its core. What's powerful is the unadorned honesty of a 54-year-old woman throwing up her hands, offering no answers or great cathartic drama, just the consolation of companionship through day-to-day sadness. There are some missteps, including a duet with James Taylor which sounds set to his pace not hers. But the most moving song, Learning the World, is very good on the grief "that rides quietly on the passenger side/ unwanted company on the long drive... and in the late-night kitchen light it sits in a chair watching you pretend that it's not really there." But, as with everything here, there's solace. This grief ends up sitting "silently on the edge of your bed/ it's closing your eyes, it's stroking your head." Download this Learning the World