It took five albums, but someone’s finally hit upon the perfect showcase for local R&B goddess Timothea’s smoky vocal technique.

Earlier releases tried far too hard to portray her as everyone’s goodtime blues mama, but the emotional stakes have been raised dramatically on the aptly-titled I’m Still Standing: for the first time in years, the lady sounds like she’s playing for real.

The missing ingredient was songwriter/producer Pat Robinson, whose presence draws out the person behind the persona. She’s been compared to Etta James in the past, but here Timothea comes off more like Mavis Staples—her sexiness comes with a heavy dose of sadness and insight this time around.

The opening trio of “Middle Of The Night,” “Time For Change” and the title track, in fact, function as a small mini-opera of regret and determination, modern urban R&B for the weary. The presence of longtime collaborator Walter “Wolfman” Washington on the duet “Maybe Later” seems to have rubbed off on the rest of the arrangements, too, drenched as they are in his particular blend of dark, slightly jazzy Uptown blues.

Timothea only strays from the script a couple of times, but it’s enough to knock her temporarily off-balance. Her cover of Earl King’s “Sunrise” is a solid tribute to the legend, but addressing it to his spirit in heaven seems just a little too showbiz-glitzy; likewise, she sings the hell out of Elvis’s “Crawfish,” but the song still smacks of cultural pandering. (Can’t someone from Louisiana write a good song about food?)

Those missteps are more than mitigated, however, by wonderful self-explanatory tracks like “Let Down By Love” and “Can’t Buy Class.” Indeed, it’s impossible to listen to “I Belong To You,” her duet with the legendary Leon Russell, without cracking a smile at their knowing interplay.

It’s good to know that someone’s finally built the right stage from which this longtime performer can offer her wisdom. Now if she can just get the rest of the world to listen.