Singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter performs Monterey’s Golden State Theatre.

The other day, singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter had a conversation with early rock and roll/R&B pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Only it’s been well over 40 years since the influential gospel singer was alive. Chapin says she was suddenly overcome by the awareness Tharpe was in the same room, breathing the same air. She could even hear Tharpe’s song “Up Above My Head,” though the stereo wasn’t on.

Some may have worried that they were losing their mind. Carpenter’s concern was translating the moment into a song.

“If I listen and I cannot hear the music/ If I swim against the current and lose sight of the shore/ If the world is offered goodness but doesn’t use it/ Oh Rosetta, what’s it for?” Carpenter sings in a soothing alto on “Oh Rosetta.”

Surrounded by some of Nashville’s best session players, Carpenter’s prose comes accompanied by unobtrusive Americana led by rich organ riffs that Tharpe would approve of.

Carpenter, a member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, has sold 10 million records. She remains the only artist to ever score four straight Grammys for Best Female Country Vocal Performance. (In 1995, she also took home a Best Country Album Grammy for Stones in the Road.) Carpenter became a bona fide country star in the ’90s; over the past decade, she’s evolved into a respected singer-songwriter. “Oh Rosetta” is one of 11 new songs on her 14th full-length album, The Things That We Are Made Of, which represents the most inspired work of her career. Under the care of renowned alt-country producer Dave Cobb (praised for his work with Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson and Chris Stapleton), the New Jersey native’s songs are sparse, tender, mighty and the antithesis of the music that put Carpenter on the map in the early ’90s. (Not that there’s anything wrong with her hits like “I Feel Lucky” and “Shut Up and Kiss Me.”)

There’s no filler on The Things That We Are Made Of. Each note is intentional, every word is important. Vulnerability grows as powerful in “Note on a Windshield”: “Some days I still think I could be someone else/ Those are the days I feel lost to myself,” Carpenter sings. “Mistaking a stranger, misplacing a heart/ How to put back together what’s been taken apart.”

Her vocals resound alongside the brush-on-snare drum in a lullaby “Deep Deep Down Heart”: “Now the sky holds the night, as the trees hold the shade/ And the road holds the map, of every journey I’ve made.”

MARY CHAPIN CARPENTER 8pm Thursday, Sept. 29. Golden State Theatre, 417 Alvarado St., Monterey. $33-$60. 649-1070, www.goldenstatetheatre.com