Ann Wilson’s new CD, Hope and Glory, languished in my car for the best part of a week before I finally shoved it in the player. I didn’t want to hate it, but, c’mon guys, it’s a covers album. I noted she was going to have a bash at biggies like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and I quashed a little shudder of apprehension. I fully expected auditory suicide.

I was so wrong.

She picked the songs because she loved them — and you can tell. Of the opening track “Goodbye Blue Sky”, she said that she covered it because she felt the original was too short, and she has distinguished herself by making another version which is too good to end so soon. It keeps all the lush swooping harmonies of the original, then adds a touch of violin and an extra half minute of Ann's bluesy warbling so you don't feel short changed.

The tracks which work best are those which set the power of that voice free. She’s getting older but those pesky high notes barely trouble her, almost besting Elton at his own tune on “Where To Now St. Peter?” and jockeying for position with Alison Krauss on the fabulous “War Of Man”. She’s not afraid to vary the tempo and calm down those powerful pipes of hers, “Get Together” being a case in point. With “Isolation”, you get the best of both worlds, like a pneumatic drill wrapped in cotton wool.

She delivers a measured performance throughout, for which she and collaborator/producer Ben Mink should be congratulated. This is illustrated most ably on Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” which is skilfully executed with the vocals well to the fore. The temptation to succumb to excessive guitar noodling is tempered; though it rocks like a good 'un at the end. In all, it's a pretty stripped back affair but it retains enough of the force of the original to please.

She has enlisted the help of some fine voices, which complement her own, including that of her sister Nancy, a combination which feels as comfortable as a hot water bottle in a cold bed. The baton passing in "Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” was a bit too much for me; switching between Ann, Rufus Wainwright and Shawn Colvin seemed to turn this track into a bit of a charity record pastiche.

As I drove and the car pulsed to the heartbeat of the music I confess, on my fourth cycle through the album, I started to skip through the more country-tinged efforts “Bad Moon Rising” and “Jackson”; it’s going to take more than Ann to convert me to a love of the hoedown, even if k.d. lang is helping her.

She finishes with the self-penned “Little Problems, Little Lies”, pulling together the theme of this 9/11 released comment on our troubled times with a tale of a dying soldier. It tacks onto the end of the album very neatly, a classic Heart-felt ballad.

Some cover versions can be downright offensive, and a whole album of them can be pretty painful. Hope and Glory wasn’t painful or offensive. It even transcended the innocuous — it was actually pretty damn good. Leave your preconceptions aside and let Ann Wilson show you how a good ol’ rocker does it.