I Need to Roam is Lucy Woodward’s ninth and most personal album yet, and it began in a classroom in Rwanda. She was volunteering there, teaching singing and songwriting to high-school girls who had escaped Taliban rule in Afghanistan. “Some of the girls said to me, ‘Where we come from, we are not allowed to do this,’” she recalls. “I told them, ‘You are free now.’” In giving the girls the tools to recognize what was newly theirs, she realized how much she had taken her own freedom for granted. Those moments sparked many of the album’s lyrics.

Woodward has seen the music business from every angle. Her career includes a Top 40 pop-rock single of her own (“Dumb Girls”) and two BMI Awards, among them a 2004 Pop Award, for co-writing Stacie Orrico’s hit “(There’s Gotta Be) More to Life.” She has made records on major and indie labels and worked with Snarky Puppy, Charlie Hunter, Pink Martini, Rod Stewart and Céline Dion. Two decades in, she still has more to say, and more to sing.

Woodward can sing anything while always sounding like herself, delivering each note as if she’s lived it, from a smoky, blues-soaked whisper to a full-throttle cry: velvet and voltage at once. The album (GroundUP Music) captures the pull to keep moving, creatively, geographically and emotionally. Recorded between Rotterdam and rural Virginia, it blends art-pop color, soulful grit, Americana warmth and global pulse. At its core is The Rocketeers, her band of nine years, whose tight, intuitive playing gives the music its swagger, honed on stages from the Istanbul Jazz Festival to Ronnie Scott’s in London.

“Always” is a meditation on the bonds that endure across time, distance and change, rooting us to the world and leaving traces long after we’re gone, so that “we will be always.” The moment it was finished, Woodward heard her friend, blues-steeped American troubadour Chris Pierce, on it. On “Wonderland,” Indian vocalist Varijashree Venugopal joins her to explore the places of adolescence where transformation strikes: good, bad, traumatic and exhilarating, sometimes all at once.

Todd Wright, her guitarist since her earliest pop tours, co-produced and co-wrote the album with Woodward, pushing her to bring everything she’d learned into one record. I Need to Roam is the sound of an artist still on the move.