With an eclectic song-list that ranges from Bob Dylan and Paul Simon to standards and originals, The Questions presents Kurt Elling's musical response to our troubled times. His take on Dylan's end of days epic, album opener ‘A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall', is a coup de theatre, the singer declaiming the apocalyptic verses with the potency of an Old Testament prophet. Previously recorded on 1619 Broadway: The Brill Building Project, Elling revisits Simon's ‘American Tune’ as a sorrowing chorale, with lines such as “Still when I think of the road we're travelling on, I wonder what's gone wrong?” reverberating especially strongly. In beautiful arrangements of Peter Gabriel's ‘Washing of the Water’, Carla Bley's ‘Lawns’ (which here becomes ‘Endless Lawns’), ‘Lonely Town’ and ‘Skylark’, the sense of zoning in on the emotional essence of the song is paramount, with Elling's immaculate legato squeezing the emotion out of every note. There are some familiar touchstones – Elling's lyrics to the Jaco Pastorius tune ‘Three Views of a Secret’ are inspired by the 13th century mystic, Rumi – and some new inspirations such as the singer's lyrics to pianist Joey Calderazzo's ‘The Enchantress’, which adapt parts of a Wallace Stevens poem (‘The Idea of Order at Key West’). Whether reinventing classic protest songs or appending new lyrical flights of fancy to existing compositions, this is a collection that resonates powerfully in the memory.