Her voice lifts, husky yet lighter than ether… These are not her songs, yet they are exhaled as something from deep within her veins. For Oscar-nominated chanteuse Allison Moorer, Mockingbird was more than a meditation on women’s voices or a departure from her own songwriting, but more an excavation of the universal truths of womanhood and the various modes and moods of female expression.

Working with roots jewel Buddy Miller, this is an organic project that in spite of its seemingly delicate nature has a strong pulse, its share of crashing guitars and swirling rhythms. Patti Smith’s seminal “Dancing Barefoot” becomes a dervish rush of euphoria, while the raw-boned tides and fade of real life relationship trajectory that is Ma Rainey’s “Daddy Goodbye Blues” is all hank and howl.

To the plaintive, there is Julie Miller’s achingly redemptive embrace of “Orphan Train,” building and surging with the song’s writer appearing for a rare vocal turn, a brittle awareness seeping through Joni Mitchell’s weary “Both Sides Now” and Cat Power’s timelessly searching “Where Is My Love”

For Moorer, whose sister Shelby Lynne contributes the self-contained, self-preservation song “She Knows Where She Goes,” life is something that is almost four-dimensional. To that end, there is no emotion, large or nuanced that holds fear—beyond the fear of inauthenticity. It is what makes the white knuckled surrender of June Carter’s “Ring of Fire” so gently logical in the eye of the fear and the storm; and it is what infuses Nina Simone’s bawdy “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl” with human need as much as raw libido in flagrant rut.

Essence. Depths. Truth with its small cracks and tiny flaws. The complications and contradictions are the tangled web she holds up with a smile. Jessi Colter’s minimalist “I’m Looking for Blue Eyes” flickers with pain, with hope, with everything tangled in seeking what is lost, while Anna McGarrigle’s “Go, Leave” is imbued with the dignity of the shattered, giving the other what they want out of self-respect and knowing the truth beyond the caprice.

That has always been the earmark of the best women songwriters: they recognize what’s going on, even beyond their own personal emotional tumult. Knowing that, they write and sing their heart—literally—out, and it’s in that realm of embracing other artists, Allison Moorer creates a work that is as much a testament to her gifts as a vocalist as it is a tribute to the passion of the feminine mystique in song.