Roseanne Cash, 63, ‘Remembers Everything’ on her new album

ARosanne Cash She Remembers Everything Blue Note

The passage of time, tenacious love, a life on the road and mortality suffuse Rosanne Cash’s new album. “From this point on there’s nothing certain/except there’s not many miles to go,” she sings in the country-rocker “Not Many Miles to Go.” In “Everyone But Me,” a solemn piano hymn, she counsels, “Our strange and beautiful lies/Fade and turn to dust.” Cash is 63; she is neither pretending otherwise nor regretting where she stands.

Cash contemplates the present as the outcome of a lifetime of choices, balancing memories and prospects, loyalties and second thoughts, repentance and acceptance.

Her voice finds equipoise in those mixed emotions. It seems transparent, natural and confiding. The nearly unornamented way she carries melodies, shading some words with the tiniest bit of a quaver, comes across as pensive and determined; it lets her find mythic resonances behind everyday details.

“Crossing to Jerusalem,” written with her husband, John Leventhal, presents a marriage as a pilgrimage toward home, telescoping a long life together into brief verses: “The birthdays and the babies/The bourbon and the tears/Roaring like a hurricane/Tearing up the years.” Another of their collaborations, “The Undiscovered Country,” considers past and future generations and longtime attachments, concluding that she is “thankful for what we don’t understand/the undiscovered country between a woman and a man.”

Cash adds a new variable to her music after collaborating with Leventhal since 1993 as a producer and main songwriting partner. Half of She Remembers Everything was produced by Tucker Martine, who has worked with the Decemberists, Sufjan Stevens, Neko Case and his wife, Laura Veirs . His tracks move Cash from Leventhal’s pristinely rootsy Americana into moodier, noirish realms.

That’s the tone of the ambiguous and gripping title song, written by Cash and Sam Phillips. Its mysterious central character is a traumatized woman who might be the narrator’s younger self or one of her victims. “Who knows who she used to be/before it all went dark?” Cash sings, and later, “I don’t know her now/my bitter pill, my broken vow/this girl who sings/she remembers everything.” Its troubles stay vividly unresolved.

While the songs face sorrows, they don’t capitulate. They place sadness alongside love and perseverance, the experiences of a long adult life; they savor consolations. “Particle and Wave,” written by Cash, measures a lifetime against the laws of physics, immutable on a scale far larger than mere human existence. “Light is particle and wave,” Cash sings. “It reveals what we hold dear/and it slows so I can hold you near.”

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