It was a packed house last Friday night at WNYC's Greenspace when I sat down with singer-songwriter Roseanne Cash to talk about her new album.

The conversation quickly turned to the sources of her creativity and the themes of mortality and love and gothic female being.

This is her first record in nearly five years,

and the four-time Grammy winner calls it her most personal album to date.

The title track was just named one of the top five songs of 2018 by the New York Times.

As the Boston Globe said, she is both speaking out and looking

inward. And you said there's nothing outside of yourself there. Not in this record, no.

The last three albums I did were themed albums, Black Cadillac about loss, and then the list, which was a

covers record, the list of songs my dad had given me when I was a kid. And then the river and the

thread, the last one, which was really geography, both emotional and ancestral and musical

of the South.

And I really didn't want to do a themed record again.

I felt this urgency to get back to personal songwriting.

Urgency is how I experience the record.

I mean, it's lush, it's gorgeous,

but there is a sense that there are things that you have to say. You say them with a kind of eloquence that allows every listener to sort of

project themselves into it. Brooke, I'm actually blushing. Thank you. But why do you think it took 14 albums to produce

the most personal ones so far? I just don't give a damn anymore. Exactly. I just, um, I mean, we were

talking about this before, about we're two months apart in age.

And at this point in our lives, you're just not people pleasing anymore.

You don't have any more EPS to give. That's, you don't have any more EFs to give. That's exactly right.

And yet, we still have a lot to say and less time to say it.

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