Though the songs on her starkly honest album Black Cadillac represent a lyrical snapshot of the various stages of grief, Rosanne Cash wants people to know her show at the Ottawa Bluesfest tomorrow night will be anything but a downer.

"It's songwriting, it's fun, it's music," says Cash, over the phone from her home in New York City.

"It's not a memorial service."

The songs on Black Cadillac, including the evocative title track, were penned in and around the time Cash's world was falling apart -- even if she didn't quite know it yet.

The 51-year-old Memphis, Tenn. native, daughter of Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto, famously lost three parents -- including Cash's beloved second wife, June Carter Cash -- along with a stepsister and an aunt, in three years.

Though she was in a dark place while writing the music, thankfully she doesn't have to mimic that trajectory to perform it.

"I'm not numb to the songs," she says, "but at the same time I'm not going out and slitting my wrists every night."

Cash says she's "probably where anybody" would be now, when it comes to grieving.

She was overwhelmed by the interest in her personal life when Black Cadillac was released in January.

After a storied 32-year career in the music business, with more than 20 Top 40 country singles and 11 chart-toppers, and putting out what she sees and many have called her best work yet, Cash somehow thought when it came to doing press she'd be able to talk about the music.

"In the beginning I didn't realize how focused the journalists would be on the back story," she said.

"I thought they would talk to me about my record and everyone wanted to talk to me about these people who died."

Cash says she stopped doing interviews for awhile and set ground rules when she returned to them.

It didn't help that the album came out on the heels of last year's controversial Oscar-nominated Reese Witherspoon-Joaquin Phoenix biopic of her dad, Walk the Line, though the album release was delayed so as not to be seen as piggybacking on the film's marketing campaign.

Cash was reportedly not a fan of the film, telling the London Guardian in February viewing a rough cut of it was like having "a root canal without anaesthetic."

Shortly before her interview with the Sun this week, a publicist came on the phone to warn against asking any Walk the Line questions, or queries about Cash's personal life.

"The journalists go home," explains Cash, "and I'm left with how I feel. Loss is a long journey.

"And a private process."

That doesn't mean she's running from her past, or burying it.

One of the covers Cash plans to perform Saturday night is a rendition of her dad's "Big River."

"Ottawa deserves the best," she says.

Rosanne Cash plays the Ottawa Bluesfest main stage Saturday night at 7:45 p.m.