Acknowledging her latest record is a deeply personal journey, birthed from the ashes of the deaths of her famous parents, Johnny Cash and Vivian Liberto Cash Distin, Rosanne Cash wants to get one thing straight: "It's not a diary."

In this way Cash was able to safeguard her most precious memories of her parents from an insatiable public that at times intruded too much into the mourning process. In some ways "Black Cadillac" is an olive branch by Cash to fans who want to share in her grief.

"I DO keep stuff my own," she insisted. "I have my own internal lines and boundaries that I don't cross. There's no way that I would give all of my memories or all of my feelings to the public. I just would never do that. In talking about this record a lot of this stuff comes up and I don't know, I have a system of checks and balances in myself."

Ironically Cash also lost her biological mother upon completion of the album and was urged to write one more song, which became "Like Fugitives." In it Cash admonishes intrusive fans: "Don't send me no more letters/with your ignorance and rage/I don't want your tired religion/I'm not a soul you need to save."

Her father's passing in September 2003, and even before that her stepmother June Carter's in May of that same year, was the catalyst for her musical odyssey. In this way Cash gives us a glimpse of the internal struggle she has experienced in trying to outrun the shadow of her larger-than-life father and their estrangement for many years after her parents divorced in 1966 due to her father's infamous drug addiction.

While Cash has avoided discussing their troubled relationship in interviews, she does address it in the songs "Black Cadillac," "I Was Watching You" and "Burn Down This Town."

In his 1997 autobiography, Johnny Cash wrote that he was first confronted by Rosanne and his three other daughters with Vivian about how he abandoned them, after receiving the prestigious Kennedy Centre Award from former President Bill Clinton.

By the time of his death, Cash had fully reconciled with her father, to the point where they had collaborated on the prescient duet "When September Comes" from her 2003 album "Rules Of Travel."

As painful as the last two and a half years have been, Cash recently told Newsweek that losing her parents has in some ways made their relationship stronger. "In some ways your parents can even be better parents to you, because there are no expectations anymore on either part," she confessed.

However Cash's opinions change daily.

"I said that because I have noticed that you can pick and choose the best qualities of your parents to relate to when they're not physically present," she said. "I engage those parts of my mom that were... she was so domestic and such a good homemaker and if I touch those parts myself I feel I'm engaging my mom.

"On Tuesday I think that and then on Wednesday I think that God I really miss them and I wish I could call my mom and tell her I just put cherry blossoms in my living room and how pretty they are. It's a constantly shifting perspective on loss."

And that's precisely the sentiment Cash conveys throughout the dozen tunes on the new album, which is a bit of a musical 'coming home' of sorts to folksier sound.

"I know that there were elements of that rootedness on "King's Record Shop" and on "Interiors" in some way and "Seven Year Ache," so it's not as if I stepped outside myself. This is definitely all familiar terrain to me. "Burn Down This Town" in particular was incredibly liberating and every time I perform it live, it still has that sense of liberation in it. It feels so natural. So like a part of my DNA."

That biological connection appears throughout the lyrics on "Black Cadillac," as Cash chimes in "The World Unseen": "I will look for you in morphine and in dreams/I will look for you in the rhythm of my bloodstream."

Some of Cash's recollections are so vivid, especially in "House On The Lake," which was featured in the Oscar-nominated movie "Walk The Line," that it actually does feel like reading her childhood diary.

"I wouldn't say I went digging for these images, but I felt like I had to bring my sense of poetry to it and refine them. But a lot of it was compelling in its own way, just a wave that went over me with a lot of these images. I don't think I went looking for them so much."

Part of the wistfulness of that song is wrapped up in the fact Cash was forced to sell it almost immediately after her father's death.

"That was 35 years worth of memories that house. You lose your childhood home when you lose your parents and that was just ineffably sad to me. After we had to put it on the market and everything was taken out of it and everything went to Sotheby's... it was just excruciating. So I was trying to figure out what remained and that's what that song is about."

For all their hardships, Cash and her father had a unique connection. Her dad referred to her as the "Brain" and they shared a love of books, philosophy, religion and music.

"We'd talk about books we were reading, books we'd just read and records we'd heard," she recalled. "I sent him "Nebraska," which is why he ended up recording "Johnny 99" and "Highway Patrolman." That was a great place for us to meet intellectually."

So while the Man In Black's adoring public mourns the loss of a hero and icon, his eldest daughter simply misses the man she called her dad.

In another part of his autobiography, Cash recalled the tragic death of his brother, Jack, in 1944 and the remorse that haunted him throughout his life:

"There's no way around grief and loss: you can dodge all you want, but sooner or later you just have to go into it, through it, and, hopefully, come out the other side. The world you find there will never be the same as the world you left."

Upon hearing those words, Rosanne paused thoughtfully, as if gathering herself and responded: "That's pretty accurate. I don't think I'm out the other side yet, it's too soon. But that sounds very true and real to me."