Rosanne Cash is sitting in the sun out by the pool.

While she conducts a phone interview, her five-year-old son Jake putts around noisily in a turtle floatation device, trying to get mom to play along.

She probably should be relaxing and not working, considering the events in her life the past 12 months. "It's been a rough year," admits Cash, who performs Sunday at the Blues and Roots Festival at McMahon Stadium.

"I don't ever want to have a year like the one I just had."

The past year, of course, saw the singer-songwriter bury her father, the legendary Johnny Cash, who passed away in September.

It was a loss the entire world mourned, considering the effect the Man in Black had on music over the course of his career.

The fact that her grieving was done in such a public manner -- from appearing on Larry King Live to performing at a star-studded November tribute concert -- and with such a great deal of support is something that, in some aspects, made and still makes the entire process somewhat easier for Rosanne to deal with. "In one way, yes, because people's sympathies and grief in losing my dad is incredibly touching and appreciated," she says.

"But in another way I'm sometimes confronted with it in a painful way because people I guess expect me to be in the same place they are and (I'm not). I don't miss Johnny Cash, I miss my dad -- it's very different."

One of the things she has to console herself with is the knowledge that she was able to record a song with her father before he passed away -- the gorgeous and haunting September When It Comes.

The song, which is featured on Rosanne's 2003 release Rules of Travel, had already been recorded as a solo, when Cash's husband and producer John Leventhal encouraged her to pitch it to her father as a duet.

"I wasn't at all sure that dad could get through it, he wasn't in good health he wasn't feeling well, but he wanted to try it," says Cash. "It could have so easily not happened and now I'm so incredibly grateful that it did happen."

It's fitting that the song should appear on Rules of Travel, an album that, itself, almost never came to be. Cash began work on it more than six years ago, but had to shelve it as a result of her pregnancy with Jake and -- somewhat less celebratory -- a polyp that had formed on her vocal chord, shutting down her singing, and sometimes even speaking, for a couple of years.

The voice came back in 2000, and with it an artistic reawakening that led to the completion of Rules of Travel, which also features collaborations with other artists such as friends Sheryl Crow and Steve Earle. Fans won't have to wait too long now for a follow-up.

Cash says the album, already with a working title of Black Cadillac, is three quarters written, and will be more in the roots music vein, an entirely different beast than Rules, which is slightly more polished with pop overtones.

The ability to be able to switch things up and incorporate different influences is something she's undoubtedly earned considering that she's produced almost a dozen No. 1 singles -- but Cash doesn't see it that way.

"I guess I just assumed I could," she says with a laugh. "It feels authentic because my influences are so diverse, from the Beatles to real hardcore country to Crosby Stills & Nash to Aaron Copland, so it's not as if I go outside of myself.

"I think if I were to record a pure jazz record that would be going outside of myself and would not be authentic. But so far it's all resonated as pretty true to myself."