By KEN TUCKERJAN. 10, 2014  On an icy December morning, Rosanne Cash was making tea in the kitchen of the Chelsea brownstone she shares with her husband, the producer-songwriter-guitarist John Leventhal, and their 14-year-old son, Jakob. Her 25-year-old daughter Carrie, also a singer and the youngest of three children that Cash had with her ex-husband, the singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell, was also staying there for a while. It was a full house, and Cash seemed to like it that way. Carrie appeared from a downstairs bedroom to ask Cash to help her find the “save the date” cards she wanted to get in the mail for her May wedding to Dan Knobler, a guitarist and producer. Mother and daughter moved around a partly finished jigsaw puzzle on a nearby table, and Cash began looking through a cabinet, pausing to answer a phone call from a close friend, the former New Yorker TV critic Nancy Franklin. Soon the cards were found, and Carrie was off to address them.  At 58, having been married to Leventhal for 18 years, Cash no longer presents herself as having a perpetually broken heart, as she did in her soul-rending 1980s hits like “Seven Year Ache” and “I Don’t Know Why You Don’t Want Me.” She has just released an idiosyncratic new album, “The River and the Thread,” a kind of musical travelogue based on a series of car trips Cash and Leventhal took over the past few years in places like Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana. It’s Cash’s dreamscape version of the South, but it’s also a way for her to come to terms with her life as a former country star who now finds herself in midcareer, as much wife, mother and friend as she is the daughter of country-music royalty. Cash doesn’t just have a circle of friends; she has a literal sewing circle, one that includes Gael Towey, who is a former Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia executive, and the New Yorker artist Maira Kalman. The first song on “The River and the Thread” makes an allusion to the sewing she learned from Natalie Chanin, a seamstress and dress designer in Alabama. “In this beautiful Alabama accent, Natalie said, ‘You have to learn to love the thread.’ I just teared up, and this chill went over me. Of course, she wasn’t speaking metaphorically, but I took it that way.”  It has been eight years since Cash’s last album of original material, and “The River and the Thread” shrewdly sidesteps two problems many performers confront in middle age: What do you do when you no longer need to rebel against your past — and hers, of course, is a dramatic one — and you also no longer have the urge to pour confessional angst into rhyming couplets?  For Cash, the solution came to her in a form she never anticipated: a project involving her father. “Arkansas State University called me in 2008,” she said. “They wanted to purchase my dad’s boyhood home in Dyess, Ark.” — a dilapidated Depression-era, W.P.A.-built house — “and restore it very accurately and asked if I wanted to be involved. I said yes right away. So many Johnny Cash projects come across this table that I say no to: books and movies and plays and records; that’s the work of other people. But this was instantly compelling to me.”  There was something about the concreteness of the project, the honesty — that it dealt with the facts of her father’s life rather than merely burnishing his legend — that appealed to her. Cash visited the site, did some fund-raising for the project and made contact again with people from her own and her father’s past, like Marshall Grant, the bassist for Johnny Cash’s first band, the Tennessee Two.  While in Arkansas, she and Leventhal decided to take a road trip. “I had forever wanted to drive down there, probably instilled by Dylan singing about Highway 61,” Leventhal said. “It was the main thoroughfare between Memphis and New Orleans, and a lot of incredible music came up and down that thoroughfare. So, finally, when I turned 60, I was like, ‘Let’s do it.’ ”  The trip provided much of the source material for “The River and the Thread.” While in Memphis, for instance, Cash spent time with Marshall Grant’s wife, Etta. “Etta told me that every morning of their lives, they got up and he said to her, ‘What’s the temperature, darling?’ I thought, That is such a practical, sweet way to start the day. And John said, ‘That’s the first line of a song.’ When Marshall died in 2011” — he was 83 — “we wrote ‘Etta’s Tune.’ That’s the first one we wrote for the album.”  Cash was born in Memphis but spent her youth in California. Her father divorced her mother, Vivian Liberto, and married June Carter in the late 1960s, and Rosanne, the eldest of four children, moved around a lot, including time in Europe as a teenager. She says her musical influences derive far less from Nashville than 1960s and ‘70s Southern California folk-rock, “Buffalo Springfield; the harmonies of Crosby, Stills and Nash; Joni Mitchell.” Although Cash enjoyed spending summers in Tennessee with her father during those stretches when he could keep his drug addiction at bay, she was never interested in following him into music despite her love of music.  Eventually, though, the poetry she wrote in her bedroom found its way into songs, some of which became hits. She landed a record contract and moved back to Tennessee when she married Crowell at 23. Throughout the 1980s, she had 11 No. 1 hits on the Billboard country singles chart. But divorce and disenchantment with the Nashville star-making machine drove her away from the South. She has lived in Manhattan for more than two decades.  These days, she says, Nashville feels like foreign territory. She has had a wary relationship with the city’s music establishment since the release of “Interiors,” in 1990, a highly personal album born of the pain of her divorce from Crowell that her label did little to promote. “That was my first big shock,” she said. “I had just had four No. 1 singles; I have some leverage. Then it’s like the record label said, ‘We don’t want that.’ It was very painful.”  Her father had a famously wary relationship with Nashville. Then again, he was a man of contradictions: religiously pious and a manic pill-popper; a sometimes absent, sometimes doting father; a Nashville hit maker whose politics of inclusion rankled many in a conservative company town. Over lunch at a restaurant in the Flatiron district in Manhattan, I asked Leventhal about the burden of being Johnny Cash’s son-in-law. He and Rosanne looked momentarily surprised, then laughed. “I don’t think anyone’s ever asked that!” Cash said. Leventhal, with mock sadness, added, “They never ask the son-in-law.” But then he became serious: “There are times, as my wife can tell you, where it’s intrusive and insane, and it definitely feels more like a burden than a gift. . . . I have a deep amount of respect for John as an artist and what he accomplished, and whether one likes it or not, John created the Johnny Cash myth. I mean, that, in and of itself, is an extraordinary act of artistry. I don’t like seeing my wife get hurt by the elements of it that are insane and intrusive — people project some crazy things.”  Cash added: “My father is a screen for some people to project their own ideals, their own agendas, on. And the craziest of them want to protect him from me — from what they imagine I am. Somebody tweeted just the other day: ‘When are you going to believe in Jesus? Your dad wants to see you in heaven.’ Like, they take on his voice. This happens all the time. ‘Your dad would not like what you’re doing.’ They think they’re channeling him from the grave and they know what he thinks of me. I mean, that’s a form of insanity.”  Cash is aware that the burden is now shifting to her children. Chelsea, she said, “goes through the same thing I did, only double.” She has found herself billed solely as Johnny Cash’s granddaughter, or as Rosanne Cash and Rodney Crowell’s daughter. “And Jake’s young, he doesn’t know the whole meshugas of mythology, the Hollywood movie” — “Walk the Line,” a movie Cash dislikes for what she considers its wayward artistic license — “or my dad’s drug addiction. If Jake becomes a musician, he’s got two generations to wrestle with. As much as my dad’s legacy is something I cherish, it’s a burden with a lot of moving parts.”  In December, Cash accepted an offer from the Library of Congress for a three-day “Rosanne Cash Residency,” during which she gave two concerts, taped a video interview about her life for the Library of Congress archive and conducted an evening conversation with the poet laureate, Natasha Tretheway, about the differences between poems and song lyrics.  Cash invited some friends to join what was billed as a “round-robin concert,” including her ex-husband, Crowell, with whom she’s now close; a young, soulful singer, Cory Chisel; and Amy Helm, the singer-songwriter daughter of the late Levon Helm. Leventhal sat center stage and directed the proceedings, calling out keys (“B-flat is the new old people’s key,” he said genially) and occasionally reaching over to tune someone else’s guitar.  Cash introduced Crowell as Leventhal’s “husband-in-law”; Crowell drawled that Leventhal was “a better man than I,” which elicited an audience laugh, followed by Leventhal’s mouthing the words “I know” to the crowd. Cash remained silent but grinning. You got the sense that this was a bit of stage business they had all performed before, but there was also a genuine warmth on display, a sense that time and music had won out over the grievances and resentments that can subtly poison a life.  Backstage, Crowell asked Leventhal to listen to a new song he wrote, saying, “It’s not even dry yet.” Crowell strummed his acoustic guitar and sang a few lovely verses. Leventhal, a poker-faced wit, assumed the voice of a fast-talking old Manhattan song plugger and announced his verdict: “It’s good, it’s good, it’s not a hit. What else ya got?” In an instant, Crowell went from crestfallen to realizing he had just had his leg pulled.  The power of Cash’s voice was so strong and clear during the Washington shows that it was easy to forget that not so long ago, a lot of people, including her, wondered if she would be able to continue singing. In 2007, she was given a diagnosis of a brain disorder known as Chiari malformation Type 1; essentially, her cerebellum was disrupting the flow of spinal fluid. She mentioned her recovery somewhat lightheartedly in a Times essay titled “Well, Actually, It Is Brain Surgery,” as well as in her 2010 memoir, “Composed.”  “Truthfully, I soft-pedaled how difficult the brain surgery was,” she said as we sat in her kitchen, talking about her recovery. “It was really hard. It took the first two years just to begin to recover. It was miserable. I still get headaches, and if I get a really bad one, I think something bad is happening. But I am so, so much better. I’m lucky. I had something they could fix.”  In “Composed,” she also wrote about losing her voice in 1998 when polyps covered the left side of her vocal cords. Although her singing now is rich and powerful, she said that she lost her voice again, three years ago: “It was my second bout of polyps, so I was on four months of vocal rest and steroids. I was crazy. Steroids and vocal rest? I was like a hurricane in a phone booth.”  Although she’s not doing a long promotional tour for the new album — she likes to see Jakob, who plays piano and guitar, off to school in the mornings — Cash hopes these songs reach beyond her core baby-boomer audience. But she’s also aware that “The River and the Thread” defies easy categorization, which could limit its airplay. “I just want it to find its audience,” she said. “I don’t know how big that is for this record.” I asked Cash and Leventhal whether they hope for a hit single. “I don’t think about that anymore,” Cash said. “A hit single? It doesn’t even make sense to me.” But Leventhal shot up his hand to register a differing opinion. “I like the tradition of having a song that some radio format somewhere wants to play,” he said. “I grew up in that tradition. I’m not always moved by things that are played on the radio, but I have a respect for musicians who can do it.”  In some obvious ways, “The River and the Thread” is an alternative to the semiconfessional songs that made Cash famous. But it’s also something else, a kind of testament to her present. Cash said she wanted to make clear that the new collection was a joint effort: “I wrote 95 percent of the lyrics and John wrote 98 percent of the music. The only time we ventured into each other’s realm was to complain.” They breathed and even slept it together: “I watch him play in his sleep,” Cash says of Leventhal. “I’m not kidding; he runs his hands over instruments when he’s asleep.”  This is an album about a marriage, a partnership that has helped inspire a new level of creativity in Cash’s work. “I was not very good in the real world until I met John,” she said. “He’s very pragmatic, very rational. I still get into dangerous places, and he’s helpful about pulling me out. My mind is like a cave sometimes. I can get too obsessive in a dark way. I have a hard time telling the difference between what’s real and not real. Entertaining too much darkness. You know what helps — if he and I go to buy a refrigerator or to the post office together; I really value those things now. Just creating normalcy.”  An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a film about Johnny Cash. It is “Walk the Line,” not “I Walk the Line.”  Ken Tucker is a cultural critic who has written frequently for The Times and whose reviews can be heard on “Fresh Air” on NPR.  A version of this article appears in print on January 12, 2014, on page MM20 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Rosanne Cash Goes Home. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
She spent half a lifetime trying to escape the shadow of her famous father. But for her latest album, she went back to the South.