LeAnn Rimes has been a country star since she was 13 and has something many former teenage sensations lack: a big, versatile voice, well-suited to melismatic power ballads and yodelirious country throwbacks and most of what's in between. But that doesn't mean it has been easy for her to outgrow her former self. Rimes recently turned 25, and though she has always had a remarkably unchildish voice (her 1996 breakthrough single was a beautiful, Patsy Cline-ish song called "Blue"), she has spent much of this decade trying to figure out where she fits on the country-pop continuum.

CHUCK BURTON / Associated Press (ENLARGE)
LeAnn Rimes sings the national anthem at a NASCAR event in North Carolina.
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Her 2005 album, "This Woman," got her back on country radio. Her new one is called "Family." That's a pretty dull title, or rather it would be had Rimes never been embroiled in an ugly lawsuit with her father, who is also her former manager and producer, and had she never been observed in a courtroom telling him, "I hate you." (They later reconciled.) "We laugh, we cry," she sings in the title track, and for once, that cliche seems to be an understatement.

This is the first LeAnn Rimes album for which she wrote or helped write every song, and the music echoes the fearlessness in the lyrics. "Nothin' Better to Do," her terrific current single (and, so far, a minor country hit), is a brash, bluesy romp; "I Want You With Me," another highlight, gives her a chance to gently belt out a love song. (Perhaps you didn't even know that gentle belting-out was possible.) There's also R&B, Southern rock, a handsome duet with the singer-songwriter Marc Broussard and, as bonus tracks, collaborations from recent albums by Reba McEntire and Bon Jovi. A dozen years into her unpredictable career, Rimes has apparently chosen not to choose.

True, she sometimes lays it on too thick: edging close to self-parody with bluesy groans and growls, or waxing inspirational (in "Doesn't Everybody") about our common need for love. She's more convincing in "What I Cannot Change," a pretty, cello-driven ballad. It's based on the Serenity Prayer, but Rimes emphasizes strength, instead: "I will change whatever I — whenever I can." Why stop now?

— Kelefa Sanneh