Mavis Staples has arguably the finest and most evocative voice in popular music today.  This voice which has only gotten more expressive as she has gathered experience singing on the stages of the world, in the times she has seen.  From her younger years singing with the family group, The Staples Singers, headed by her father, the legendary Pops Staples, and made up of her brother and sisters, through working with the likes of Bob Dylan, Levon Helm, and Prince to touring with her sister Yvonne and her recent breath taking recording with Ry Cooder, We’ll Never Turn Back, and now this new work with Jeff Tweedy, has all showed a willingness to take chances and stretch.  She is a singer that has lived her songs and thus has the emotional depths to make the songs her own and sing them with the solid conviction of someone who has survived and grown from the experiences.  She did this disc with Jeff Tweedy producing at Wilco’s studio Chicago studio (home town to both of these artists) and he wrote two songs for the disc, and she is accompanied by her touring band of several years.  There is Rick Holmstrom on guitar and vocals. Jeff Turmes, bass and vocals, Stephen Hodges on drums and Donny Gerrard background vocals.  The sound is augmented by Jeff Tweedy on guitars, bass and vocals; Patrick Sansone, keys and vibes; Mark Greenberg on vibes and keys; and background vocals by Kelly Hogan, Nora O’Connor and Richard Parenti. 
 
This is a disc that has captured the path of this iconic singer with songs that hark back to ones her father, Pops Staples, wrote as well as ones from a diverse group that includes Randy Newman, Reverend Gary Davis, Allen Toussaint, Little Milton and John Fogerty.  As different in times and background as these writers are these songs are all made special and taken to heart by this singer and the musicians, and they sound as if they were all written just for her; even Newman’s Losing You, which is a song of a defeated person, defeat is not at all in her make-up,  but she takes the song to show that even from painful loss there is good that can come if you know how to use it.  The songs are a mixture of the sacred and secular and the sound is completely modern.  This is another gem by this singer who only gets better, takes music to new heights, sometimes by showing the lowest lows, without losing the sacred roots even with the passing of years. That life though ever fresh and new has its roots in the hallowed soil of past.