When Rosie recently sold a vintage guitar to a fellow Austin TX musician, he dubbed the beat up beauty a real “working girl’s guitar.” The next day he called with what would be the title track to her latest album, but, as he told Rosie, “I didn’t write it, the guitar did.” It’s a poetically apt story to sum up the transcendental spirit and music of a road survivor like Rosie Flores.

Rosie Flores, the Rockabilly Filly, the versatile virtuoso on the working girl’s guitar, strips it down to the lean meat of her playing, singing, and songwriting on her 11th album, and, for the first time, Rosie handles all production duties and covers all the guitar bases. Right out of the gate, Rosie fires up her big-chord guns—because, at its heart, any Rosie record is a guitar record—for songs that tell some hard-learned tales. Resonating with miles of grit, grace and determination, the anthemic title track gallops out of the sunrise, and the Texas blues rave-up “Little But I’m Loud,” throws some serious devil longhorns. The instrumental “Surf Demon #5” rides some slinky West Texas waves, and the chunky guitar on the King’s classic “Too Much” is a muscular contrast to her sly come-hither purrs. And don’t overlook Rosie in full-on rockabilly rumble mode with the Janis Martin cover of “Drugstore Rock and Roll.”

But there’s more than just six-string heroics on Working Girl’s Guitar. “Yeah, Yeah,” a gorgeous tribute to a fellow road dog, the late Duane Jarvis, channels some languid, longing Beatles-inflected pop. Adding to the light that glows through the sadness is pedalsteel player Greg Leisz, the prolific West Coast multi-instrumentalist who has appeared on recordings by A-listers such as Dave Alvin, Wilco, Sheryl Crow, Robert Plant, and Bon Iver.

The elegantly cool “Love Must Have Passed Me By” is an old school countrypolitan duet with the pop music legend Bobby Vee (“The Night Has a Thousand Eyes,” “Take Good Care of My Baby”). “If” is straight up soulful street corner doo-wop and the re-imagining of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” adds some Django Reinhardt here and some shuffle there, imbuing it with an elegiac tenderness reminiscent of the Everly Brothers.

Like the woman herself, Working Girl’s Guitar crackles with a loose, straightforward energy fit to be played everywhere from palaces to bars.