Grim days call for fierce love, and multigenerational talent Mavis Staples is laying it down. On her fifteenth solo album, Sad and Beautiful World, Staples stands side by side with her listeners in the face of dangers she knows all too well. The record spans seven decades of the American songbook — a range nearly as vast as Staples’ career — and includes reinventions of timeless songs as well as original music.

Few people wield the combination of lived experience and musical artistry that Staples possesses, including the lived experience of being a Black woman playing music in the South during the Jim Crow era. The creators of Freedom Highway, Staples’ family band, Staple Singers, made the literal soundtrack for the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery. Staples has spent a lifetime standing up for those people most often beaten down by those in power.