Twenty albums now, and none before like this.

“It’s emotional for me, and it’s personal, and it makes my heart pound, thinking I’m going to be totally exposed here,” says Nanci Griffith, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter and Americana Music Association Lifetime Achievement Award winner. Intersection is not an album of resolution or closure; it’s an album about difficulties, about anger, about things that slip away and things that explode.

“I’ve had a hard life, and I write it down,” Griffith sings on the title track, and that line serves as a statement of fact and purpose, and as a gentler way to explain her near-shouted musical exclamation, “Hell no, I’m not alright.” Intersection is an examination of a particularly difficult time for Griffith, fraught with personal bust-ups, with family turmoil, with hard miles and tears and habits to break. “At some point, you have to get it out,” she says. “I couldn’t walk around with the anger. I didn’t write these songs to punish anybody. I thought I wrote them to get these things off my chest. But now I’ve taken them on the road, and every night when I sing, ‘Hell no, I’m not alright,’ and I see my audience come to their feet, I understand exactly why I wrote this.”

A small group of musicians banded together at Griffith’s Nashville home for the making of Intersection. Multi-instrumentalist Pete Kennedy drove his recording equipment down from New York City, and he, Griffith, singer-songwriter Maura Kennedy and percussionist Pat McInerney set about creating the album. The four share producer credit, and they made the bulk of the music, with Eric Brace and Peter Cooper contributing harmonies, Richard Bailey of The Steeldrivers adding banjo, Robbin Bach singing backing vocals, and the world’s most famous road manager, Phil Kaufman, making his recorded bass debut on “Come On Up, Mississippi.”

Griffith is beloved as a songwriter but also as someone who unearths others’ songs and brings them to light. In the past, those songs have come from the pens of then-little-known writers including Julie Gold, Kate Wolf, Lyle Lovett, Eric Taylor, and Robert Earl Keen. On Intersection, her choices of outside material were as personally driven as her solo compositions:

Intersection is Griffith’s 20th solo album and the latest achievement for the Grammy award-winning artist.