As long as human beings try to express their emotions in language, magic still exists in the world. Mary McBride conjures that magic in the deep, deep emotional waters of her songwriting. She has hit on striking images and cavernous depths in the past, but The Way Home is her masterpiece. McBride comes from a place where the songwriter’s soul is torn open, revealing the spirit behind the heart. It’s the same place Townes Van Zandt inhabited, the soul space that nourished Laura Nyro and Joni Mitchell. Not that her writing specifically resembles the form of theirs, it’s just that McBride’s songs come from a place where words mean far more than marks on a page.

There are precious few song cycles about the minefield of love as moving as The Way Home. It’s hard not to be riven by McBride’s work, but this time she’s pulled the pillars of love’s temple down around her. And emerged smiling.

I been thinking about you
I been thinking about too much too soon
I been thinking about knowing when
It might be time to let you in

The tenderness of her voice as she sings these words reveals how carefully McBride’s songs creep across the knife’s edge of emotion. She knows enough to trust her heart, but she also knows that when it comes to love, we really know nothing about the future.

What McBride does know is that she’s open to the exhilaration of falling in love. She describes the ineffable joy of love’s discovery in the exultant “That Thing You do to Me,” a song about the little details of a lover’s exchange, that thing “that brings me right down to my knees.” And once she’s there, she’s a constant lover who wouldn’t change her beloved.

But that doesn’t mean McBride will tolerate abuse. She writes as expressively about the thorns as she does about the roses. “This tricky tricky world will knock you on your side,” she sings in “Tricky Trick World.” And in “You Got Me Wrong,” she throws down the gauntlet: “I took it took it took it again and again/and I won’t take it never ever again.”

The Way Home is alternately tough and tender, capable of taking a hard line in one song and surrendering in the next. Most of all, McBride understands that love is an experience that is beyond simple comprehension, something you can only take at face value and savor like the juice of an exotic fruit that can be delicious but can also turn at a moment’s notice. She exhibits profound emotional strength in these songs, a tenderness and grace that can evoke a smile and a tear simultaneously.

McBride ends the album with a lullaby to a distant lover, a nocturnal hymn filled at once with longing and comfort. No matter where it becomes lost on the road of life, the heart always finds the way home:

Tonight you’re far away
Tonight I wonder why
Pretend I’m there
And say goodnight