“I’d like to get stoned,” sings Alice Peacock over a shambling electric guitar at the beginning of her fourth album, Love Remains. It’s a startling, if tongue-in-cheek, way to kick off a set of country-tinged pop-rock tunes recorded in the heart of Nashville. But like the title of the song in which it appears, “All About Me,” it’s also a tad misleading. In fact, the song is about setting aside self-indulgent fantasies to embrace love and commitment, and after a few verses of wistful imaginings about Jack Kerouac road trips and “no sacrifice,” Peacock concludes – as swelling pedal steel and honky-tonk piano guide the waltz – “The life that I’ve got/ I guess that it’s not/ All about me.” The song provides a fitting gateway to the album’s deepest themes and a statement of purpose after Peacock’s acclaimed 2005 album, the introspective, piano-driven Who I Am. “Enough navel-gazing!” Peacock declares with a laugh. “This is a really positive record,” says the Chicago-based singer/songwriter. “It’s a reflection of where I am in my life and what really matters to me now. The title comes from this idea that other things fade away but love remains.” The often buoyant, outwardly focused lyrics are mirrored by a largely ebullient musical approach rife with feel-good guitar hooks and heartland grooves. It might seem a radical departure for a classic-pop troubadour like Peacock, but she says her primary collaborator on the disc, co-producer/co-writer Danny Myrick, made it feel pretty easy. The two found that the commonalities in their backgrounds – Myrick is the son of a southern Baptist preacher, Peacock the daughter of a northern Methodist minister – strongly influenced their co-creation. “Danny and I grew up singing in church, like a lot of preachers’ kids,” Peacock reflects. “Music was always really important for us, even if we didn’t necessarily buy the theology. There was good and not so good in our upbringing, but you don’t need to throw out the baby with the bathwater.” “Writing with Danny brought me back to the best memories of my upbringing,” she adds. “The music we’re doing now is spiritual – and this record is in some ways a homecoming, reclaiming the essence of the faith we had growing up.” That faith is reflected in myriad ways on Love Remains: in the joyous embrace of divergent paths (the rollicking “Real Life,” the rocking L.A. kiss-off “City Of Angels,” the Cajun-flavored travelogue “Fairborn”); in the humbling experience of finding a soul mate (the delicate, accordion-and-banjo-spiced “Lovely,” the playfully old-fashioned “Wrong Time”); in understanding one’s own limits and life’s unpredictability (“Do What I Can Do,” the expansive, gospel-inflected “Trying To Hold Back Time”); in the necessity of opening one’s heart in an often bitter world (the punchy, resolute “Forgiveness”); in the acknowledgement of death’s inevitability and human connection as the true measure of our lives (the timeless-sounding title track). Faith is also found in some of the toughest moments on the record, like the devastating, indelible “I Am Mary” (about a mentally ill homeless woman at the center of a larger tragedy) and the gorgeously intimate “Angel” (which chronicles the yearning for a child not yet conceived). But perhaps the most striking expression of this spiritual homecoming is the anthemic “If I Could Talk To God,” which imagines the Almighty’s exasperation in the face of human discord. “The song came out of a theological discussion,” Peacock explains. “We felt God would say, ‘What the hell are you doing out there, you idiots? Love each other. That’s it. Can’t you all just play nice?’” Still, lest anyone think the making of Love Remains was all weighty discussion and Sunday-school testifying, Peacock notes that the process was more like a family hootenanny. “We found great musicians who were also just wonderful guys,” she says. “They were a blast to hang out with and made me feel completely at home. They really embody this spirit of musical community you find in Nashville, and I just wanted to gather that feeling around me like a warm blanket.” “It was about the vibe,” she elaborates. “Who could we put in the room? When Danny and I were writing together, just the two of us with guitars, cracking up and having a blast, the music had this Tom Petty/early Linda Ronstadt/John Mellencamp/Sheryl Crow-made-a-country-record feel to it,” Peacock reveals. “I said, ‘Pedal steel? F--- yeah! I want it on every damn song!’ I love that ’70s, California-country sound, and I’m totally unapologetic about trying to recapture it.” The players who helped sculpt the aural landscape of Love Remains include pedal-steel player Dan Dugmore (Linda Ronstadt); multi-instrumentalist Phil Madeira (Emmylou Harris); guitarists Kenny Greenberg (Willie Nelson, Brooks & Dunn, Gretchen Wilson), Rob McNelley (Delbert McClinton) and Scott Dente (Out Of The Grey); drummer Will Denton (Steven Curtis Chapman, LeAnn Rimes); and mandolin and banjo whiz Ilya Toshinsky (Bering Strait). Myrick, living up to Peacock’s description of him as “the groovemeister,” played bass. Along with several songs she wrote on her own and a few she penned with other songwriters (such as John Paul White, with whom she crafted “All About Me”), this latest batch of tunes finds Peacock in a new place, both thematically and geographically. But her abiding belief in the power of music is a constant. “Can music change the world?/ Yeah, I think it can,” she sings in “Forgiveness,” and she has a story to back it up. “I did a TV gig in Italy with an Italian band,” she recalls. “They didn’t speak any English. But I showed them the chords to my song and they smiled and laughed – we had this complete conversation without language. To me it was just another example of how everybody connects through music. Music is one of the highest expressions of humanity. It’s this auditory exclamation of who we are.” No, Alice Peacock has too much going on in her life to drop everything and get stoned. But she’s going to keep getting high on what she does best and feels most deeply. And judging by the songs on Love Remains, her listeners will catch the same buzz.