Now in her 70s, Eliza Gilkyson has been writing songs and singing them all of her adult life. Far from slowing down or exposing the vagaries of age, she just gets ever more interesting. On her current project, Songs from the River Wind, she lovingly conjures up the West, both historical and personal, along the way nodding to some authentic traditional folk songs ("Wanderin'," "Buffalo Gals," "Colorado Trail"), which she reworks to accommodate her own wealth of life experience in Rocky Mountain country.

Producer Don Richmond brings satisfyingly spare acoustic settings to mostly somber material where regret, sorrow, loss and longing predominate alongside a keen sense of fading mortality. Gilkyson's intimate vocal style helps shape the particular atmospherics of the occasion. (The -- literally -- happy exceptions are a lively "Buffalo Gals Redux" and her own sole creation "The Hill Behind This Town.") Gilkyson contemplates what the landscape looked like before white settlers and developers overran it. Such thoughts are not just esthetic concerns but inherently political ones.

Though Gilkyson has composed expertly crafted protest songs in the past, here she deals with the underlying issues of environment and race by leaving them unspoken but omnipresent.

If one were so inclined, one could think of the people in River Wind's stories (except for "Charlie Moore," an American Indian, born in the 19th century, whom Gilkyson knew in her childhood) as more like ghosts than like living humans. The real focus is the ageless, if injured, natural world on the left side of American maps where urban sites, surrounded by masses of ostensible emptiness, are marked. It's in that emptiness that Gilkyson finds her stories, her memories, and her spiritual point of reference.

Albums like this one -- plainspoken, wise and true -- are rare. Most recording artists are young, without enough years in them to sing in this voice from this vision, so much larger than the blinkered one afforded the narrowly focused, in-a-hurry pop hit-maker. Gilkyson isn't nearly as famous as she deserves to be, but her art touches places that the typical singer-performer seldom imagines are there to be moved.