'Composed' Rosanne Cash makes peace with past

(11-09) 04:00 PST New York - --

Rosanne Cash is going to appear the next day on "Good Morning America." She looked in the mirror that morning and thought she needed to lose 5 pounds, so she doesn't eat her french fries and orders her hamburger without the bun. Show business demands sacrifice.

Her dark hair has a lustrous auburn sheen, and in her eyes, it is easy to see her father, Johnny Cash. She has a warm, easy smile and is wearing boots and Cash black, sitting at lunch in Chelsea at the Norwood, a private club that caters to people in the creative arts. One of her pals, songwriter and novelist John Wesley Harding, happens to be upstairs shooting a video.

Songwriter Cash, 55, who made it to the Bay Area for the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival last month and returns Sunday for an SFJazz concert at the Palace of Fine Arts, said she has made a "cottage industry" out of writing essays and articles for publications such as Rolling Stone and the New York Times since she published her first collection of short stories in 1996. Earlier this year, she released "Composed," a memoir that showcases her crisp prose and rich emotional life, and an album called "The List," songs drawn from a list her father gave her when she was 18 years old. The list contained 100 country, blues and gospel songs he considered the bedrock of American music, a study guide for his daughter.

She worked on the memoir on and off for 10 years. Three years ago, she underwent life-threatening brain surgery for a rare condition. After more than a year of recovery, she returned to writing the book.

"After the brain surgery, I felt this urgency to finish this," she says. "I needed to find the narrative. I didn't want to write a straight chronology or a recollection of a lot of events. It was a pastiche, not an autobiography. I couldn't write that."

After grappling with the loss of her father, mother and stepmother within two years and the traumatic surgery, she says she is whole in ways she has never been before, centered, calm and, well, composed. With her book and this record, she has made peace with her past.

" 'The List' inspired me to finish the book," she says. "It was an embracing of the legacy, my ancestry, my upbringing, my DNA. Doing 'The List' was the first step."

She lives in the neighborhood with her record-producer husband, John Leventhal. This town has a way of making New Yorkers of the most unlikely people; Johnny Cash's oldest daughter has lived in lower Manhattan for 20 years. She has three grown daughters and a stepdaughter she also raised from her first marriage to country songwriter Rodney Crowell, and an 11-year-old son at home with Leventhal.

She was 26 when she made her first public appearance in 1981 at Cotati's Inn of the Beginning, a scared young woman who looked as if she wanted to run away after every song. She and record producer Crowell made a string of No. 1 hits on country radio beginning with her second U.S. album, "Seven Year Ache," in 1981, although country radio dropped her after the dark 1990 album "Interiors," a chilling, brutal examination of the disintegration of her marriage.

She wrote the songs for the 2006 album "Black Cadillac" under the cloud of grief that covered her life when her parents died. "I found the list again after I finished 'Black Cadillac,' cleaning out some files."

For the "Black Cadillac" tour, she designed a more theatrical multimedia show, which included narrative passages using the list and some of the songs. "At the end of every show, people came up to me and asked when I was going to record the songs from the list," she says.

"I wanted to do an album of covers - I wanted an emotional break - and John said the only covers album to make was the list. I said no. It was scary to me, making my claim, sticking my sword in the sand, and then it was wonderful."

In her book, Cash plumbs her emotional memories, more than simply recounting events, with stark candor and impressive self-awareness.

"I wanted to approach it in a very rational way," she says. "I didn't want to engage in any navel-gazing, any sentimentality or self-pity. I wanted a clear-eyed and objective assessment. I hate self-indulgent confessional books."

Her episodic book reaches an emotional climax as she recounts her father's death in 2003. She is still raw and puddles up easily at his memory. Johnny Cash was a tall tree - to his daughter, most of all. Grief is her companion. "You have to put yourself in the stream of what's authentic," she says. "There is no right. There is no wrong."

"With time," she writes in "Composed," "the unbearable becomes shocking, becomes sad, and finally becomes poignant. Or maybe poignancy isn't the conclusion to grief. Maybe there is something beyond poignant that I haven't experienced yet."

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This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle