For the cover of her new album, Patty Loveless recreated a scene from her childhood.

It shows Loveless playing a guitar in a darkened room while an old-fashioned record player, its cover open, sits on a table in the background and vinyl LPs are strewn at her feet.

"I did have a turntable in my bedroom," Loveless, 51, said during a telephone interview from her Georgia home. "I would go in, especially when I was 12 years old, and I'd pull out all the records I had and lay them out on the floor and listen to them over and over."

"Sleepless Nights," Loveless' first album in three years, revisits many of the songs that kept her company so many years ago.

Loveless interprets classics like the title cut by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, "The Pain of Loving You" by Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner, "He Thinks I Still Care," a hit for George Jones, "Crazy Arms," memorably recorded by Ray Price, and "Cold, Cold Heart," one of Hank Williams' best songs.

"This record gave me an opportunity to honor some of those folks I grew up with," said Loveless, who will perform Sunday night at American Music Theatre in East Lampeter Township. "Some of these songs I had done in my past when I was 12 years old. I've been performing a lot of these songs for many, many years."

Loveless, blessed with one of the great voices in country music, makes herself right at home with this material, investing it with all the heartache and poignancy it deserves.

Her version of "Cold Cold Heart" alone is worth the price of admission. And Loveless said the inclusion of that song was an afterthought.

"We almost didn't cut that," she said. "We had 30 minutes left in the session and figured we'd just go for it. The way it went down is what it is. I am totally in love with that track."

Loveless and her husband, producer Emory Gordy Jr., who was behind the controls for "Sleepless Nights," moved in 2006 from Nashville, Tenn., to Georgia.

After releasing "Dreamin' My Dreams" in 2005, Loveless said she wasn't sure she'd ever record again. She said a combination of personal tragedy (deaths and illnesses have weighed heavily on her the past few years) and professional hardships ("Dreamin' My Dreams" was fraught with production problems that caused a recall of the CDs after they were initially released) forced her to take a break from the business of making music.

"I felt like my heart was torn out of me," Loveless said. "And the music, to me, is about my heart. I want to put my whole heart and soul into it. If I can't … "

Loveless, who grew up the daughter of a coal miner, became a star in the late 1980s and early 1990s on the strength of songs like "Timber, I'm Falling in Love," "Chains," "I'm That Kind of Girl" and "Hurt Me Bad (in a Real Good Way)."

She hit her commercial and artistic stride in the mid-1990s. Her 1994 album "When Fallen Angels Fly" won the Country Music Association's Album of the Year award and her 1996 album, "Trouble with the Truth," yielded a pair of No. 1 hits, "You Can Feel Bad (If It Makes You Feel Better)" and "Lonely Too Long."

The hits, however, suddenly dried up, though the quality of her work remained consistently high.

Loveless returned to her Kentucky bluegrass roots in 2001 when she released the sensational "Mountain Soul," earning some of the best reviews of her career.

" 'Mountain Soul' wasn't supposed to do anything," Loveless said. "The label didn't even know what to do with it. They said, 'This is a great record but we don't know what to do with it.' I was like, 'Does the name Patty Loveless mean anything? Does it?' Gosh, after, working all these years, you'd think it would."

"Sleepless Nights" follows a similar strategy, though it mines the best of traditional country instead of bluegrass.

Loveless said she and Gordy had been talking about an album like "Sleepless Nights" for a long time.

She was without a record contract, having left Epic Records after the debacle of "Dreamin' My Dreams." She was approached by the folks at Time Life and was delighted when they reacted enthusiastically to the notion of Loveless recording an album of traditional country tunes.

"These songs are always in my heart and always in my soul," she said. "I'm a country girl and I'm a traditionalist."

Country music needs more artists just like her.

Patty Loveless with Junior Brown, Sun., 3 p.m., American Music Theatre, 2425 Lincoln Highway East, $45, 397-7700.

E-mail: jferguson@lnpnews.com