Melissa Errico’s new album is a collection of standards that are not standard. Though many of the songs are familiar, even classics; they evade the usual categories of American music: the torch song, the ‘I want’ number, the patter-comedy turn, the wash-that-man-out-of-my-hair song. An intuitively discovered body of work, these are songs of conversation and reflection, songs that ask themselves questions privately, more than they declare their desires loudly and publicly. There are moons and Junes in these songs, but reality too. Here are songs of self-reliance and self-reflection, often sad, even when the feelings resolve in equipoise. With Melissa, a song isn’t a torch song. It’s more of a searchlight. A love story made of sighs and secrets rather than neat happy endings; and a series of evasions and implications. Love as an obstacle course run by adults rather than meadows measured by children. Spring will be a little late this year. Only a little, but that’s enough.

These songs are drawn from what Melissa calls “the field of poppies from which sprang Sondheim’s opium.” Errico’s years singing Sondheim, in the ever-extended Sondheim project, have brought her a new and unusual delicacy with the standards. Her diction, her clarinet of a voice, and all the skill learned in the classroom of the self-conscious ironies and comma-bound contradictions of Sondheim, are applied to reimagine the emotional resources of the American Songbook.

Music by Frank Loesser, Cy Coleman, Duke Ellington, Peggy Lee, Van Heusen, Rodgers & Hart, Jerome Kern, Sammy Fain, Dave Frishberg, Dori Caymmi, and Joni Mitchell. Words by Carolyn Leigh, Dorothy Fields, Alan & Marilyn Bergman, Oscar Hammerstein, Johnny Burke and more.