On first hearing Darlingford, I was surprised and impressed to notice that -- in defiance of all expectations one entertains in the face of acoustic singer-songwriters of her generation -- Cara Luft sounds nothing at all like Joni Mitchell. I had long since assumed that such a thing might not possible, or even legal. Cara Luft sounds like, well, Cara Luft, which as we learn soon enough is no bad thing.

Beyond its folk and folk-pop moorings, however, it falls within the well-known, well-worn category of breakup album. Such phenomena may cause one to wonder how the rest of us -- that is, those without recording contract or musical talent -- ever manage to get through such traumas. In any event, Luft follows the familiar arc: disbelief, despair, eventual return to more or less normal life, bruised, battered, but in some manner or other better for it. No folk singer -- or any singer in any genre -- will ever match the ultimate breakup album, Dylan's Blood on the Tracks; but then, nobody else has to. If other musicians had to climb as high as that, there'd be no climbing.

Even with its deeply personal subject matter, Darlingford is tuneful and relatable. It's also honest and unpretentious, and moreover, it's not all originals. The Winnipeg-based, ex-Wailin' Jenny, guitar and banjo picker Luft is happily versed in actual folk -- traditional -- music. It's here on two of the cuts, the ubiquitous, albeit gender-adjusted, ghost ballad "He Moved Through the Fair" as well as "The Ploughboy & the Cockney," obviously learned from the Maddy Prior/Tim Hart version. She tackles the late Derroll Adams's 1960s anti-war anthem "Portland Town" in a reading as gripping as any I've heard. A fourth non-original, Mike Scott's "Bring 'Em All In," further pleases.

Luft manages to maintain, if sometimes shakily, a sense of ironic distance, nowhere more so than in the wry "Idaho" (written with Lewis Melville), which has her staying with her Christian Right aunt and having to sleep "in the basement with George W. on the wall." Not, she lets us know, a preferred companion. The hard-hitting "Dallaire," a catalogue of apocalyptic images as if out of the Book of Revelation, puts into words a realization that comes sooner or later to all enduring the pain of relationship collapse: Yes, my life could be a whole lot worse; all I have to do is to turn on the television and observe some foreign blood-bath to put my own suffering into perspective. "Dallaire" is a song of rare power and moral imagination. It isn't, of course, "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," but then, there has to be only one of those.

Along the way, Luft will remind insular American listeners that "south of the border" does not denote the same geographical designation to everyone who occupies the North American land mass. The final cut, "Charged!," isn't linked thematically to anything that's gone before, but it's a lesson, evidently derived from Luft's real-life experience, in the insanity of borders and drug wars, and not just those involving the United States and Mexico.

Each of Darlingford's 13 cuts is a worthy song laying proud claim its own identity. Besides that, Luft produces herself expertly. It ought to be done this way more often.