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Cohn will appeal to the Lilith Fair crowd (she was a top-five finalist in its talent search, as well as a national finalist in Jewel’s recent Soul City Café contest), and the way her lilting voice slips into the upper register draws frequent (and worthy) comparisons to Sarah McLachlan.

But Cohn’s songcraft clearly flickers with its own distinctive musical tints. Her willowy voice is the centerpiece, memorable for the effortless grace with which she breathes emotional nuance and melodic sophistication into her songs. She inhabits her lyrics in a way that connects earthy with ethereal, and her music seems an ever-present extension of her conscience. In a review of The Absence of Moving (her fourth album), Performing Songwriter magazine alluded to Cohn’s “windblown spirituality”; it’s an apt description.

At the heart of Seven Year Surrender is the struggle to properly resolve fragmented relationships in order to move on. For Cohn, such reflection elicits personal insights that pave the way for healing and, ultimately, healthy new connections. Resilience and hope are prevalent themes as well, underscoring the human craving for belonging and intimacy.

Cohn’s lyrics resonate from different perspectives: as poetic self-meditations, as revealing cautionary tales, and as relationship post-mortems directed toward former lovers. The sting of loss is tempered by the resolve to learn and not return, as Cohn sings in “Never Going Back”: “I’ll say goodbye to heartache/I’ll say goodbye and wish you well/’cause I’m never going back to emotional hell.”

Musically, Cohn constructs a rich and varied instrumental framework for her melodies. She and Seattle’s Martin Feveyear co-produced the album, and together they find the right balance of rootsy and airy elements, drawing from the expressiveness of guitarist Val McCallum (Vonda Sheppard, Jackson Browne), the tasteful guitar, organ, and string arrangements (incorporating violin, viola, and cello) of Greg Fulton, and Cohn’s own shifting touch on guitar, piano, and Fender Rhodes.

Surrender opens with the bluesy, woozy bray of McCallum’s electric slide guitar on “Pass a Little Hope Around”, followed by “Doormat”, featuring a lovely piano figure buoyed by an elegant string arrangement. In the shimmering country-folk ballad, “Never Going Back”, Cohn’s sublime vocals float over a loping rhythm flavored with atmospheric slide and clucking banjo arpeggios. “Different This Time” is a blue-mood ballad, heavy on the mind like a sleepless night, as the song’s sluggish pulse and flugelhorn melancholy trudge along at the urging of Cohn’s hushed vocal: “What keeps you going back to the past/To that one person you can’t get out of your head/You think that six years would be enough/To give up everything you worked so hard to get away from”.

“Come on Home” rebounds with catchy, sweetly layered vocals. On the spare acoustic waltz “Sailor”, it’s just Cohn’s minimalist acoustic fingerpicking and her beautifully longing voice. In “L.A. Ballad”, Cohn’s groggy, purposely warbled pitch evokes the messy unraveling of a transplanted relationship in the “airless town” of L.A., along with the dangers of clinging to distorted memories that freeze and idealize people as they no longer are. In “Guarantee of Grace”, Cohn’s beautiful circular lyric is accented with acoustic guitar and Rhodes. “Blind Date” is Cohn’s grooviest track, blending guitar, Rhodes, drum loops, banjo, and muted trumpet, while the jaunty ‘60s electric-guitar-fueled pop of “Good Citizen” seems to toss off the album’s deep introspection for a fun evening out on the town.

No matter where her songs emerge from on Seven Year Surrender, Cohn’s weathered hope shines ahead.