Glass is one of those small big words poets most prize. As a saxophonist, flute player, clarinetist, and synth player, Nora Stanley has accompanied many of our most cherished living songwriters, including Cassandra Jenkins, Beth Orton, and The New Pornographers. She has performed improvised creative music with Benny Bock, Fred Frith, Kenny Wollesen, and Peter Apfelbaum, too. Luckily for us, Glass is not a simple summation of these not-so-disparate paths. The complexity of that giant noun characterizes Nora’s approach to this record’s production as much as it does the variegated career that led to its existence. Glass is a record of subtly devastating songs by a cool headed observer; a mirror and a window.

Teaming up with engineer and creative force Nate Mendelsohn, this is the first major release of Nora’s songs. Their poetry is as indebted to Anne Carson’s emotional precision as it is to the visceral, digitally clean sensibility we hear in ML Buch. There’s a guardedness to the lyrics on Glass, as if the events around the singer take precedence over her reaction to them.

On “Dying Twice,” Nora sings such icy nouns as “cranial fracture” and “ asphyxiation” before personifying fear as a cowering crab, all to describe the real twin fears of plane crashes and environmental devastation. “Headstone” is a meditation after a friend’s psychotic break renders him homicidal. On these tracks, the coldness of her language is at once protective and terrifying, transparent and defensive as glass itself. On other pieces, like “Noble Gas,” and “St Elmo’s Fire,” we hear how tenuous romantic desire is, how it wounds and frustrates her. The album’s first peals of processed saxophone and flute settle into increasingly acoustic territory as the record progresses; similarly, the true dramatic stories winnow into something more essential and about the ways loss transcends all events, intimate and extreme.