If this is mountain bluegrass, the mountains are the Rockies. The bluegrass is in a different form from the one my generation drew. If not for the instruments, arrangements and players (who include such genre notables as Bela Fleck, Sam Bush and Stuart Duncan), at least at one time bluegrass would not be the first slot in which one would fill the space available for it. The pop touches are not hard to detect in some of the songs, many of them originals; they begin with the vocals. With electricity and arrangements to match, much of this could be better-than-usual country-pop.

Though she is new to me, I learn that Rebecca Frazier recorded her first bluegrass disc in 2001, with the title (Born in East Virginia) referencing an Appalachian folk song that survived into the bluegrass repertoire. According to a profile in this month's Bluegrass Unlimited that is guiding me here, her last release prior to this one was 11 years ago. Boarding Windows in Paradise emerges from a period of turmoil and change following motherhood and divorce. Some of the cuts take their inspiration from the latter, including a lovely bluegrass take on Roy Orbison's magnificent break-up anthem "It's Over."

Even though my own musical instincts are sufficiently reactionary that my bluegrass listening is confined mostly to the foundational bands and their modern equivalents, I'm not so frozen in place that I don't appreciate the need for, or practice of, innovation. I recognize interesting music even when it isn't fully to my taste. Windows is quite good, and Frazier is clearly a superior talent. She is not a tourist in bluegrass country, but it does come out of her with a unique voice, literal and metaphorical. One measure of how you feel about her will depend upon how many outside genres you will allow to shape the music.

The creator of the genre, Bill Monroe, didn't stand for anything that strayed much from the style. "That ain't no part of nothin'," he famously fumed. But bluegrass would not have survived without innovation, even if that innovation took it away from its rural roots in an increasingly citified nation. Windows is not all brand spanking new material, however. Frazier features "Saro Jane," which the young Uncle Dave Macon heard on the Ohio River in the 1880s and had the smarts to copy down; if he hadn't, the American tradition would be absent one of its most thrilling songs. She also wrote the oldtime-resonant instrumental "Cantie Reel."

Some of the originals, on the other hand, are genre-specific only because they're in acoustic arrangements, e.g., "Borderline" and "Seasons." Both are divorce songs, and one is struck by how little they sound like bluegrass (or for that matter trad-country) treatments of that subject. While divorce is just as painful as it ever was, older songs treated it almost as an affront to the singer, usually the one who got left. Here, however, Frazier seems either philosophical or stoic. Either adjective applies, but it's unmistakably a modern statement.

Your response to Windows will be a subjective one, corresponding with how music reaches you and gives you pleasure. No sensible listener, on the other hand, will deny Rebecca Frazier's outsized gift and her ability to deliver songs her own way.