Matraca Berg is perched in a booth at Burger Up, a hip restaurant in the 12South neighborhood of Nashville. It’s a surprisingly warm Saturday afternoon in mid-February and outside the restaurant 12th Avenue South is packed with pedestrians and traffic. Cars pass by with the windows down, blasting Taylor Swift from their stereos.

Inside Berg studies the menu intently, a glass of Pinot Grigio in hand. At forty-seven, her angular features look flawless against the lacquered wood of the bench, framed by strands of mocha-colored hair that cascade down past her shoulders. But the focal point of her face is a pair of dark, wide-set eyes that say everything. They are equal parts power and vulnerability, joy and melancholy, a rich brew that reveals a mature knowledge of the world and its workings. Make no mistake: Matraca Berg is fierce.

She makes her food selection, laying aside the menu and taking a sip of wine. “So let’s talk about the record,” she says.

That album is the highly anticipated The Dreaming Fields, a magnificent collection of songs, due out May 18th from Dualtone Records.

“When you’ve been married or had a relationship for a certain amount of years, life takes on a slightly more sepia tone,” she explains. “Things get complicated and you go to some dark places to get to the other side. And then family members have addictions and there are parents with dementia, and on and on and on. The songs that came out of that were completely different, and I knew I wanted them to be heard somehow.”

This release marks her return to recording after an absence of nearly fourteen years, following the critically acclaimed Sunday Morning To Saturday Night, a buoyant album which Berg refers to as her “love record.” It stands in stark contrast to the deep, aching melancholy of The Dreaming Fields. “It wasn’t even about me wanting to go out there and be in the spotlight again, it’s just that these songs meant a lot to me,” she explains.

If her track record as a songwriter is any indication, the songs will resonate with listeners as well. Berg is the lauded wordsmith behind some of the biggest country hits of the last three decades, boasting eleven Number One records including “Wild Angels” (Martina McBride), “I’m That Kind of Girl” and “You Can Feel Bad” (Patty Loveless), “Wrong Side of Memphis” and “XXXs and OOOs” (Trisha Yearwood), and the iconic “Strawberry Wine” (Deana Carter), named Song of the Year by the Country Music Association and nominated for Best Country Song by the Grammys in 1997. Her songs have been recorded by the likes of Dusty Springfield, Linda Ronstadt, the Dixie Chicks, and Loretta Lynn.

But despite her success as a songwriter, the country music industry has never quite known what to do with Berg as a recording artist. Following her sterling 1990 debut Lying To The Moon, her restrained vocals and literate songs seemed to be swallowed by the wave of high-octane performers like Garth Brooks. Throughout the early 1990s, Brooks filled arenas with his sold-out concert tours, offering audiences rock theatrics that included elaborate pyrotechnics, hurtling from trapdoors, and soaring over the crowd on a harness. Although such spectacles undeniably broadened country’s fan base, it also began squeezing out more literary performers who had composed the genre’s backbone. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Rosanne Cash—who had delivered eleven Number One hits, twenty-one Top Forty country singles, and two gold albums during the 1980s—relocated to New York during this time.

Berg’s intended sophomore album, Bittersweet Surrender, was shelved after her label insisted she make a pop record. Instead, The Speed of Grace was released 1994 and performed poorly on the charts. And while her third effort, Sunday Morning To Saturday Night, showed promise three years later with radio-friendly singles like “Back in the Saddle” and “That Train Don’t Run,” her label folded, and the record floundered in the absence of the muscle supplied by a marketing team. “I just stopped,” she says. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do next, so I just kind of semi-retired as an artist. I went back down to zero, and stayed at home. Wrote songs.”

This time around, the story promises to be different.