Virginia Hill’s modern folk ballads of love, loss, searching and the spirit make you want to hit the back roads in a classic car, turn up the radio and sing along. Her soulful vocals, bolstered by a playful pop energy and layered over spare yet textured instrumentals, may remind you of an old-school diva like Patsy Cline or singer-songwriters like Shawn Colvin and Jeff Buckley.

“I auditioned for my first rock band in high school, and almost immediately I had this ‘aha’ moment where I thought ‘Wow! I could do this for a living,’” she recalls. That dream eventually took her to Berklee College of Music in January 1987, but the time wasn’t right. “Who moves to Boston in January?” she laughs. “I was overwhelmed, with all the great musicians there. I was afraid of failing, maybe afraid of succeeding.” After two semesters, she decided to take a break, and for much of the 90’s the dream of recording an album lay dormant.

“We all have this ‘call,’ and if you don’t listen, it grows faint,” Hill says. “Fortunately, I was able to stay connected to that voice.” At age 34, she went back to school. She wrote songs for class projects and gradually built confidence in her writing. After graduating from UVA in 2002 and accepting a position as the Vocal Music Teacher at Walker Upper Elementary School in Charlottesville, VA, she started taking guitar lessons with Sam Wilson (who is now touring nationally as lead guitarist for the up-and-coming rock band Sons of Bill).

Working on her songs week by week, the idea of recording an album began to take shape. “Sam’s style may be different from mine, but he honored what I was doing and helped give me the drive to create this project,” Hill says. Wilson recruited some friends for the recording, and Hill found that having a team of professionals to back her up made the recording process almost effortless. “Brian [Chenault] and Brian [Caputo] are amazing musicians. The songs came together right away in rehearsal.”

Infusions of jazz - and the occasional country twang in Wilson’s lyrical guitar work - yield an album with broad appeal that mirrors the universal themes in Hill’s compositions. “What kind of music is it? It’s folk in the most literal sense: music for and about people,” she says. “It’s reaching into the heart and finding out about the human condition.”

Realizing a lifelong dream by releasing this album is just a step along the path for Virginia Hill. “There’s all this pressure that if you didn’t live your dream when you were 20, it’s over. But I’ve been planting seeds all this time.”