Many great jazz artists have complained about having to compete with their younger selves as reissues of their classic career-defining artists often more in demand than their contemporary work. Really, though, almost every mature, successful artist faces that challenge, and for prolific R&B singers such as Irma Thomas, the problem is greater. How does she please the audience for her hits, the fans who want to hear some of the great, minor hits and overlooked songs, and how does she record music that gets the attention of those in love with the music she made 30 to 40 years ago?

 

Recording with a really good band is a great start. On After the Rain, she has David Torkanowsky and David Egan on keyboards, Corey Harris and Sonny Landreth on guitars, fiddler Dirk Powell, bassist James Singleton and drummer Stanton Moore. Landreth’s buzzing slide guitar gives “Flowers” a bristling energy to the Kevin Gordon-penned song about the roadside crosses and the stories connected to them.

 

Staying emotionally precise helps as well. If recent recordings have had a weakness, it has been a tendency to present a song’s emotions in soft focus, letting a wistful, wiser melancholy do the job. Here, she sings the Doc Pomus-Mort Shulman composition, “I Count the Tears” more exactly, putting on a brave face for the verse, then losing that face in heartbreak at the end of each chorus.

 

Thomas doesn’t need to demonstrate her relevance, but she rewrites the blues “Another Man Done Gone” to reference Hurricane Katrina. Rather than write something specific that might date, though, she stays in the blues idiom, writing in broad, iconic strokes that “Another man done gone / didn’t even know his name / another man done gone.” The song doesn’t blame or rage; it mourns the loss of some unnamed man and, by extension, all the people who died, whose names are unknown to somebody.

 

Thomas has reminded listeners of her skill as a blues singer recently, cutting an excellent, hard-nosed version of Bessie Smith’s “Back Water Blues” for Our New Orleans, and the songs by Gordon, Egan and Eleni Mandell among others play to her strengths. The closest thing to a misstep is Egan’s “Stone Survivor,” which states a little to directly the persona she now inhabits. She sings it as if it were her song, and while the triumphant bounce of it is winning, it feels a little like caricature. That said, the simple, direct fun of it will make it a crowd-pleaser.

 

It’s tempting to think of After the Rain as akin to Johnny Cash’s American Recordings or Loretta Lynn’s Van Leer Rose, but Thomas isn’t as far into her career as either of those artists, and this isn’t a reinvention or a return to a stylized version of her younger self. Instead, Thomas and producer Scott Billington have given Thomas the songs, musicians and instrumentation to show off her remarkable talents, and they succeeded. Thomas sings these songs as an adult and shows the musical and emotional wisdom an adult has to offer.