"You follow it, knowing there's no other way" - Mary Chapin Carpenter's "The Calling"

I've always been a sucker for a good travel song-"Six Days on the Road", "Midnight Train to Georgia", "500 Miles", all of them. Even better is a good travel album, where each song captures the sense of longing, weariness, and anticipation that comes with every journey. Lucky for me, Mary Chapin Carpenter's The Calling is the best one I've heard in a while.

Carpenter has been a major voice in the folk-pop movement since the late 1980s, hitting her stride around 1992 with her Columbia release, Come On Come On, which spawned her first number 1 hit, "He Thinks He'll Keep Her," and my first introduction to both Carpenter's and Lucinda Williams' music, "Passionate Kisses." Carpenter is blessed with the kind of guttural voice that makes everything she sings sound profound. It just so happens that much of what she sings is profound, or at least thoughtful. Her songs touch on politics, religion, loss, and the search for something bigger than ourselves.

There's been a lot of lamenting lately in the mainstream music press, bemoaning the fate of the album as an art form in the face of the iPod generation, where singles are king. I am generally a singles person myself (hence my regular column, "Single of the Week"), which makes me a bit of an outlier in the music criticism world. It also means that I've forgotten how nice it can be to have a cohesive album that plays as a complete journey from start to finish. The Calling begins with a literal call to arms, or rather, a call to pilgrimage. As one would expect from a pilgrimage, signs and omens play a major part thematically, leading to the arrival on the third to last song, "Here I Am."

Musically, the album is mostly soft and approachable but not weak, with lovely melodies and easy rhythms, the hallmarks of folk music. There are a few more rollicking numbers, namely "On With the Song," dedicated to the Dixie Chicks ("This isn't for the ones who blindly follow," she sings, "This is for the ones who stand their ground"), which gives you a good idea of the kind of stance Carpenter takes on the album. For my money, the catchiest song on the album is "Houston," the song that falls directly in the middle of the album and which encapsulates the sense of travel implicit through the rest of the album ("Roll on Mississippi, goodbye Crescent City"), but there's not a weak song in the bunch.

Every album tells a story. Mary Chapin Carpenter's The Calling is a condensed version of the search for place and purpose that we all go through-and a beautiful one at that. I highly recommend you check it out.

Sarah Erlewine, Music Correspondent:

Sarah’s column, Single of the Week, published every Wednesday to Gather Essentials: Music (http://music.gather.com), is a look at the latest up-and-coming singles highlighted on iTunes and available for free download.

Sarah Erlewine has previously written for the All Music Guide. In her daily life, she is a technical writer for Ferris State University in Big Rapids, MI.

You can find all of Sarah’s columns at http://www.gather.com/singleoftheweek .

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