The ever eclectic Terry Scott Taylor

It’s hard to believe, but Terry Scott Taylor—the lead singer and main songwriter of the venerable Christian rock institution known as Daniel Amos—will turn 72 this May.

Despite tracing his beginnings as a professional musician back to the halcyon days of Jesus Music, he has maintained an almost preternaturally youthful approach to the dispersing of his clever and increasingly philosophical faith-based insights through sonic prisms. Country rock, rock ’n’ roll, New Wave, Beatle-esque art pop, Americana—Taylor has apparently never met a genre that he didn’t like or whose parts he couldn’t use to flesh out a concept.

True, listeners will detect a wistful, looking-back quality in his latest enterprise, This Beautiful Mystery (Stunt). In the opening number, “Be That as It May,” he makes peace with a lifetime’s worth of missed opportunities, while “These Are the Last Days (for You and Me)” turns the details of the ’70s rapture craze into metaphors for Taylor’s (and everyone else’s) impending mortality. And in crediting his granddaughters with inspiring “Signs and Wonders” and “Ave Eva!,” he’s hardly downplaying his age.

But both his sense of humor and his sense of wonder remain fresh even when they’re aroused by subjects he has explored before.

G.K. Chesterton (the subject of “The Everlasting Man”) and Flannery O’Connor (the subject of “Flannery’s Eyes”), for example, made appearances in the title cut of the 2001 Daniel Amos album that This Beautiful Mystery resembles, Mr. Buechner’s Dream, while other literary references (to C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allan Poe, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers) extend the musical conversation with Great Authors that Taylor has conducted since “William Blake,” on Daniel Amos’ Vox Humana.

And Taylor’s latest eviscerations of contemporary sacred cows (he targets the self-aggrandizing and self-defeating weaponization of social media by overzealous Christians in “The High-Tech Tribulation Force” and “The Meek”) have their roots in such 1980s Daniel Amos takedowns of the pharisaical high and mighty as “Big Time/Big Deal” (from ¡Alarma!), “I Didn’t Build It for Me” (Dopplegänger), and “Return of the Beat Menace” (Darn Floor—Big Bite).

But what most makes This Beautiful Mystery beautiful and mysterious is the care that Taylor has put into the sounds that bear his words, singing, and melodies aloft.

Members of Daniel Amos appear throughout (rocking as one on “The Meek”). Meanwhile, Phil Keaggy adds guitar to “From the Case Files of C. Auguste Dupin” (the Poe song), and even the songs that don’t feature a violin, viola, and cello or mixing by Mark Linett (the Grammy-winning engineer best known for his work with Brian Wilson and Beach Boys) shimmer.

Few pop-musical visionaries have done their best work 40-plus years into their career. Taylor is one who has.