Rosalie Sorrels: “What Does It Mean to Love?� <i> Green Linnet</i>

If you want a quick, Valentine’s-card answer to the question that Sorrels, one of the great figures of American folk music, poses in this album’s title, you should turn elsewhere. It takes her more than an hour to explore her theme, but, as she says at one point, quoting Colette on child-raising, “It is important not to be in a hurry.�

Sorrels comes at love from surprising, often oblique angles as she strings together the varied pearls of her distinctive performing style. There are a cappella songs and songs with light string-band accompaniment, delivered in a lived-in but lovely voice, as well as literary readings and personal musings that she invests with the folksiness and flair of a natural storyteller. The album, like one of the 60-year-old Idaho woman’s remarkable concerts, is a continuum that’s both wonderfully warm and keenly thought-provoking.

For Sorrels, the primary loving relationship is not between romantic partners. That bond, she suggests in her beautiful original song “Apples and Pears,� is often too brittle to last. She spends more time dwelling on how goodness and care for life’s most generative things (nature, the play of the imagination) are transmitted. For her, it’s the adult-to-child bond that’s key.

Sorrels has shown elsewhere that she can be dark and wrenching. Here she concentrates on promoting the positive in segments that set out the slowing of time, closeness to nature and a fascination for the mind’s inventive possibilities as prerequisites for a loving life. She takes a wry swipe at television as the enemy and takes pains to rescue Malvina Reynolds’ lovely “Turn Around� (“Where are you going my little one, little one�) from its long-ago entombment in a TV commercial.

She ends with a masterful, 26-minute reading of Rudyard Kipling’s tale “The Cat That Walked by Himself.� With it (or, at least, by its implications), Sorrels makes the case that the capacity for self-love, exemplified by the cat’s pride, wit and independence, has a lot to do with the answer to her title question.

Sorrels’ work is warm, suffused with an intelligence molded by experience, and loving. If you were wondering what the exact antithesis of the “Beavis and Butt-head� experience might be in popular culture, here it is.