Workin' on a World

The 2016 US presidential election and her engagement with activism and political music, including the 2017 song We Won't Keep Quiet, drew her back to writing. She went into the studio in 2019, felt the music was not working as an album and shelved it. Her stepdaughter Pieta Brown urged her to finish, and a few sessions in 2022 completed the record. She debuted the title track in January 2023.

Sam Sodomsky of Pitchfork gave it 8.0 and called it a parade on a stormy day. He pointed to Goin' Down to Sing in Texas, an eight-minute protest song prompted by a sign at an Austin venue telling the audience how to handle their firearms. The Cherry Orchard is a piano ballad about a character in Chekhov's play, and Let Me Be Your Jesus is a poem by Greg Brown that she delivers in a whisper. Metacritic scored it 85. Rolling Stone's Jonathan Bernstein wrote that her music had rarely felt so urgent, and Robert Christgau placed it fourth on his Dean's List for 2023.