Rosanne Cash doesn't take anything for granted these days. She knows how lucky she is to be talking about her new and quite possibly best album, "Rules of Travel." In fact, she knows that she's lucky to be talking at all.

Five long years ago, Cash and husband/producer John Levanthal began the process of making "Rules of Travel." The album's songs had been assembled with Cash writing the lion's share of the material and picking up some help from a few stellar friends (Joe Henry, Jakob Dylan The Odds' Craig Northey, Marc Cohn, Robert Burke Warren and, as always, Levanthal).

Just as the sessions kicked off, Cash found out that she was pregnant. The joy of that discovery was tempered by a darker event: the nearly complete loss of Cash's voice. Recording ground to a halt.

"For a couple of years, I sounded like Tom Waits with laryngitis and that was on a good day," says Cash with a laugh from her New York home. "Some days, I could just barely whisper. Some days, I couldn't talk at all."

Cash's doctor discovered a polyp on her vocal cords and informed her that it was a fairly uncommon hormonal side effect of pregnancy. She was assured that after delivery, the polyps typically went away. Unfortunately in life, just as in her amazing and singular music career as a pop/country hitmaker and as the daughter of the legendary Johnny Cash, Rosanne Cash was anything but typical.

In 1999, she and Levanthal welcomed the birth to their son Jake. By early 2000, Cash's voice had yet to return.

It was a strange circumstance for Cash. She had always been something of a reluctant superstar, even when her albums effortlessly spawned 11 number 1 hits in the '80s and '90s. She tended to think of herself as a writer first and a performer second and a distant second at that.

When she lost her voice, she was actually somewhat relieved at the prospect, believing in some ways that it completely defused the pressure of having to follow up 1993's well-regarded "The Wheel" and the intimacy of 1996's "10 Song Demo."

As she waited for her voice to come back, she concentrated her creative efforts on her burgeoning prose writing career, finishing a second children's book, writing magazine articles and editing a book full of musical essays entitled "Songs Without Rhyme."

They were nice diversions, but Cash never saw them as replacements for her musical career.

"It wasn't a fallback," she says. "I've always been very passionate and serious about it, but I always thought of it as an adjunct to being a singer/songwriter. I never thought that I'm only going to have this left."

But as the weeks stretched to months, Cash was forced to confront the possibility that her singing career had just ended, not on a high note as such, but on no note at all.

"I hadn't resigned myself to it, but I was going through a dark night of the soul about the possibility," says Cash. "I didn't know if I was going to get it back, and I didn't expect to feel the loss of my voice so deep and so sad."

Suddenly, the once hesitant singer was terrified at the thought of a voiceless future and began to question her own muted identity. Her ability to effectively parent her children was even disturbingly cloudy.

"I remember clearly one day standing at the bottom of the stairs, struggling to yell up to my kids, and I couldn't get it out," says Cash with a retrospective laugh. "John came over and yelled up to them, 'Don't make your mother try to yell at you!'"

The other unfortunate side effect of Cash's vocal malady was the understandable depression that accompanied it, a psychological darkness so pervasive that she found it impossible to pick up a guitar and attempt to write.

"I couldn't write songs," says Cash. "To pick up a guitar when I couldn't sing with myself was too depressing."

Although she was despondent over her vocal impairment, Cash continued to monitor the music scene, which inspired its own set of frustrations and issues."It was very frustrating," says Cash. "I felt like the kid who wasn't invited to the playground."

Finally, in the fall of 2000, Cash's voice slowly began to heal. With a long convalescence and the help of a vocal coach, her voice grew in strength and range until she had regained the abilities she had lost for over two years.

"I was lucky," says Cash without a hint of irony. "It took a long time, but at least I didn't have to have surgery, and I got my voice back."

By the time Cash was physically able to resume work on "Rules of Travel," the songs (with a few slight exceptions) that would comprise the album had remained largely unchanged; it was everything else that was different.

Cash had gone for over two years without hearing her real voice inside her own head, and when it finally emerged again, she had to get used to the sound of it. And that was the least of it. '

Clearly, the album was going to have a very different outlook than it would have five years ago.

"Too much life had gone by in three years," says Cash. "I'd had a baby, 9/11 had happened, my dad had been very, very ill, and I was faced with the prospect of losing a parent, my kids were in adolescence and growing out of it. You bring your life to your projects and none of that life would have been brought to it if it had been finished in '98."

For all of the potentially negative forces that could have had an impact on Cash's state of mind as she picked up the thread of "Rules of Travel," one overwhelming positive outshone them all.

"I came back to it with a new appreciation of being a singer, that this was something I really treasured," says Cash with conviction. "Before, I always looked at it as a glass-half-empty thing and saw my limitations and the anxiety surrounding its performance. I came back to it with more freedom."

Although she readily admits that Levanthal was more driven to finish "Rules of Travel" at the outset, Cash herself was quickly drawn into the emotional whirlwind of completing the album that should have been done five years before. With a handful of tweaks (lyrical finishes to "44 Stories," completion of verses to the title track), she began revisiting and reviving the material on "Rules of Travel."

Early in the process, Levanthal and Cash listened to the songs (which all seem to deal either literally or metaphorically with the road and its attendant journeys) with an ear toward bringing in guests, ultimately finding places for Sheryl Crow ("Beautiful Pain"), Steve Earle ("I'll Change for You") and Teddy Thompson ("Three Steps Down").

Perhaps the single most powerful moment on "Rules of Travel" is Cash's duet with her father on the astonishing "September When It Comes," a rumination on (among other things) life and mortality.

Upon hearing the demo, Levanthal immediately recognized the natural brilliance of inserting Johnny Cash into the song. Perhaps understanding innately how such a move could be perceived as an exploitive maneuver to drum up publicity after a seven-year gap between albums, Cash resisted the notion of even approaching her father about the idea, especially considering his health issues at the time of the sessions.

"That's why I said no the first three times John asked me to ask him," says Cash with a laugh.

Although initially hesitant, Cash took the track to her father's Tennessee cabin studio and watched in amazement as the process of learning and recording his vocals seemed to rejuvenate the elder Cash. When the first collaboration between the pair was complete, there was little doubt in anyone's mind that it had been appropriate and undeniably successful.

"Ultimately it was about the song," says Cash emotionally. "When I took everything else away and what people's perceptions might be and just looked at the song, I knew it was the right thing to do. It's like the ultimate family photo to me. It's really precious to me."

With the completion and release of "Rules of Travel," perhaps the best consequence to come from the experience is Cash's return to the songwriting process, something that she hasn't done since the initial sessions for "Rules of Travel" five years ago.

"I've written four songs since the record came out," says Cash. "I'm back at the place I'm at after I finish every record, which is 'I can't really write any good songs, and I've gotta start all over again and relearn this whole process.' It's the classic writer's thing."

Just as importantly, Cash has rekindled the inner fire to continue the pursuit of her music career, something she had all but abandoned well before the trauma of losing her voice.

"I feel enthused about the whole process now," says Cash. "There was a period when I didn't care if I ever made another record. I didn't care if I ever stepped in a studio or sang another song. I was burnt out not only on the process, but on the industry. I just hated the whole machinery, I hated the values, and I hated having to put myself through certain steps to promote a new record."

For all of the uncertainty and pain that has accompanied Rosanne Cash along the thorny path of making "Rules of Travel," she ultimately believes that the setbacks and doubt and physical and emotional duress she experienced was all for the best and perhaps even vital to her continuation as an artist in the musical community.

"It's like a developmental crisis, you know, it happens in middle age," she says with a laugh. "Mine was just particular to my profession and personality. As it turns out, letting these years go by was a really good thing. I've gotten older so it isn't tempting to play certain games that I might be tempted to play if I were younger as far as promotion or videos or trying to set myself up in a certain way or pop radio or whatever. It doesn't even cross my mind. I'm going to be 48 next month, and this is a mature record. The industry is not really set up for me to promote it, but I'm doing what I can. I'm enjoying the process with less anxiety."