A feeling of optimism and warmth resonates through Nora Jane Struthers’ new album Bright Lights, Long Drives, First Words, which finds the artist looking back on a year of big changes. Recorded when Struthers was eight months pregnant with her first child, she worried if she would have the lung capacity to sing this set of soulful ballads and upbeat anthems. (“I had a lot of other stuff going on in my body,” she laughs.) But with her band the Party Line behind her — and her husband, musician Joe Overton, singing backup — Struthers breezed through some of the most inspired and inspiring songs of her career.