Anybody who knows the music that Kentucky's Bill Monroe invented will hear the phrase "West Coast bluegrass" and think immediately of a revered practitioner, the Bay Area's Laurie Lewis, who has been singing it and playing it on guitar and fiddle for decades, all the while building a formidable reputation. It would be odd, possibly even unnatural, not to like a Laurie Lewis album. I suppose it could be accomplished if the listener were phobic about roots music in general. Such people exist, unfortunately. For those of us spared such an affliction, a new Lewis release is bound to cheer the soul.

Trees has Lewis undergoing some adjustments, principally the absence of her longtime musical partner and band member Tom Rozum, retired owing to ill health, though his voice joins the harmonies on three cuts. This is not a hard-core bluegrass recording, either, though an occasional cut may qualify. Stylistically, you might call this country-folk, with fiddle and banjo sounds calling up the music currently being honored with a first-class postage stamp and surviving, miraculously, as a more or less paying enterprise at the fringes of the industry.

Lewis's voice remains the marvel it has always been, expressive, heartfelt, but never syrupy. There is also her impressive songwriting talent, applied here -- as has long been the case -- to meditations on our connection with the natural world; more darkly, those reflections sometimes turn to our destructive relationship with it, for example her heartbreaking "Enough," about the effects of a massive forest fire. The melodic "Texas Winds," a love song, sets its sentiments in the landscape of the rural Lone Star State, overwhelming my usual objection to an overworked genre -- in short, not quite, as the Austin Lounge Lizards would have it, another stupid song about Texas.

I am, however, drawn in particular to "Why'd You Have to Break My Heart?", quoting John Prine's words after he heard her and her band playing at a festival. Prine was a unique figure, not only because he created a charmingly personal style out of early Dylan influence, but also because he was something Dylan has never been: beloved. Dylan's personality has long discouraged that kind of emotional attachment; let's face it, too, that some of his songs are just plain mean. I'm sure Prine, like all of us, had his personal faults, but his music exuded sincere affection for all our foibles and empathy for our tragedies.

In her song, Lewis recalls what pedestrian activity was interrupted when word of Prine's COVID death came over the radio. Fittingly so, because in a fundamental sense Prine was a poet of the pedestrian. Myself, I remember my first grief-stricken thought: "Oh no, now there'll never be new John Prine songs again."

Lewis, who often turns to her talent to a traditional song or two, this time draws on obscure material from songwriters John Hartford ("Down on the Levee"), Bill Morrissey ("Long Gone") and Dixie & Tom T. Hall's "Hound Dog Blues," the last set to a Jimmie Rodgers melody. None of these composers are alive today. Their passing, Prine's too, warns of the darkness to come as the artists who've helped carry us through fall silent and, as the song says, go up home to live in green pastures. As if to underscore the point, joining the departed in the past few days was the legendary Minneapolis folksinger/bluesman Spider John Koerner, a huge talent, a ubiquitous influence and a world-class eccentric.

But Trees won't drive you to these gloomy thoughts. If you know her music, you'll just be grateful that there's more of it. Now, get listening.