With her new album, "Feels Like Home," Ronstadt returns to the country-accented folk and rock she premiered in 1974 with "Heart Like a Wheel." Her exceptional soprano has deepened and taken on additional colors since then, and her phrasing has gotten more adventurous. Producer George Massenburg goes a tad over the line here with a gauzy, over-orchestrated version of Neil Young's After the Gold Rush, where Ronstadt is joined in trio vocals by Emmylou Harris and Valerie Carter, but on the whole "Feels Like Home" is her best album in many years.

The biggest surprise of the record is a mandolin/bluegrassy treatment of Tom Petty's The Waiting. Sung full-tilt, as opposed to Petty's more subtle reading of the lyrics, the song seems less a quiet declaration of joy and release than a shout-it-to-the-world exaltation. While "Feels Like Home," titled after Randy Newman's hymn of thanks for a loving relationship, is a bit too reserved and low-key in its choice of material (the closest Ronstadt comes to a cut-loose, rock-out raveup is on Matraca Berg's Walk On), it's an inordinately pretty record, from Ronstadt, Harris, and Claire Lynch's magnificent harmony vocals on the A.P. Carter country-folk offering Lover's Return to the poetry of David Olney's Women 'Cross the River to the ongoing sense of loss on The Blue Train, previously recorded in a less pristine, more aching version by Maura O'Connell. Guest instrumental performances by fiddler Alison Krauss, mandolinist David Grisman, and slide guitarist Roy Rogers add yet another level of superior musicianship.

Aside from merely making good music, though, Ronstadt has done something else with this album - she's taken herself out of the "inspiration" class and made herself a contender again. Welcome back, songbird.