Dark ‘Interiors’ of Rosanne Cash : Country: Cash’s seventh album explores her inner depths, yielding an uncommonly dark and intimate profile. She plays the Coach House on Sunday.

With her new album, “Interiors,” Rosanne Cash set out to dive as deeply as she could into the loneliest, chilliest depths of the human psyche.

Consequently, this uncommonly dark and intimate album appears to be taking a dive of another sort: in a marked departure from Cash’s strong past commercial performances, “Interiors” has fared poorly on the country charts.

Cash, who plays two acoustic sets Sunday at the Coach House, didn’t sound perturbed by the slack sales picture as she spoke over the phone from her home in Nashville.

“It doesn’t surprise me at all,” she said with a laugh, when asked about the album’s slow commercial start. “When I was working on it, I said, ‘God, this is not a radio record. It might sell five copies.’ A real producer wouldn’t have made this album. It’s far too unbalanced, and kind of eccentric.”

Maybe, but Cash thinks--justifiably--that “Interiors” is her best work. Serving as sole producer for the first time in her seven-album career (counting a 1989 greatest-hits collection), Cash turned out a spare, introspective and cohesive recording that doesn’t offer the easy uplift that conservative radio programmers might want, or the all-out emotive wailing of more conventional country pain-fests. There are hopeful moments, but they are tempered by the chastened, tightly clenched mood that pervades the album.

“I don’t think it was as much a departure as much as what I’ve been trying to do for 15 years,” said the 35-year-old singer, who is Johnny Cash’s oldest child. “It was finally getting to the root of what I’d been trying to do. There comes a point when you have to do something that’s kind of definitive for yourself. I thought (previous) records were accurate reflections of who I was at the time, and how deep I could get” in probing inner feelings. In making “Interiors,” she said, “I looked at it as interior scuba diving.”

With her 1985 album, “Rhythm & Romance,” Cash established that she had the artistic gumption to sing about her inner hurts. The album was largely an autobiographical account of the upheavals she was experiencing in her marriage to the talented country singer and record producer Rodney Crowell.

Cash resisted the notion that “Interiors” might be seen as a sequel to that album, a second chapter in an ongoing chronicle of a tempestuous relationship.

“Everybody says it’s about marriage. I say, ‘Yeah, probably,’ but it’s more about individual unraveling. Obviously, marriage is a good mirror for what’s going on in your own psyche.

“I went through a painful couple of years, and it gave me a motivation to do a lot of writing,” Cash added, without elaborating on the real-life problems that she translated into songs on the new album. “But it’s an oversimplification to say I wrote it just about that. Once you have an experience, you always have it as a color on your palette. You can always refer back to it.”

“Interiors” may not be selling as swiftly as Cash’s last album of new material, “King’s Record Shop,” which yielded four No. 1 country singles. But she says feedback from listeners has been strong, convincing her that the album’s psychological probing hits home with those who hear it.

“It makes me realize that people want to talk about the dark stuff, the hard issues. They want corroboration for their own pain. They want other people to validate it, to reflect it back on them. The record is very personal, but it also is universal. The human condition is not any different from me to you.”

Cash said she doesn’t like to analyze her songs publicly.

“I don’t want to diminish them, and talking about it seems to diminish them,” she said. “Once a woman told me how much she loved ‘Blue Moon With Heartache’ (a 1981 hit for Cash) and that she and her husband had these long conversations about the song. I asked her, ‘Do you want me to tell you about the song?’ She said, ‘Oh, no, please don’t.’ I liked that. I don’t want to take anybody’s interpretation away. It makes it that much richer.”

With the recurring images of relationship strain in “Interiors,” it’s natural to assume that there is plenty of emotional wear and tear going on in the Cash-Crowell household (the couple has four children, ages 2 to 14, the oldest being a daughter from Crowell’s previous marriage). But Cash said her working relationship with her husband has become more comfortable than before.

“We did a tour together in Europe in May, and that was really fun,” she said. And the couple is thinking for the first time about carrying on the old George Jones and Tammy Wynette Nashville sweethearts tradition by recording a duet album. “We’ve been writing stuff together with that kind of project in mind,” Cash said.

For a long time, Cash and Crowell had resisted touring or recording together (Crowell did produce the vast majority of Cash’s recordings until she took over and made “Interiors” on her own. The one exception was the bulk of “Rhythm & Romance,” which Crowell has said cut too close to the bone for him to be involved as a producer).

“We’ve always avoided” releasing an album as a duo, Cash said. “We didn’t want to make our marriage fodder for the machine. But we’ve been doing this a long time, and it could be something well-founded now. We didn’t want to do it as a cheap shot, but as an artistic thing, waiting till the time was right and we were both pretty well-grounded.”

Crowell admitted in an interview last year that he had felt some professional jealousy toward his wife as her recording career took off in the early to mid-’80s, while he remained a cult artist, at best.

“That was part of it,” Cash said of their previous reluctance to tour together or make a duo album. “It’s no good to do a project together when one of you feels like that.”

But Crowell found a wide audience of his own with his hit 1988 album, “Diamonds & Dirt,” and last year’s follow-up, “Keys to the Highway.”

“He still doesn’t pick up his clothes off the floor, but he’s doing OK in the psychic realm,” Cash said wryly. “He’s doing good. He’s grown.”

Cash credits her husband with keeping his distance while she went about producing her own album, and then, when he got to hear what she’d done, being honest enough to make pointed but constructive criticisms.

“He just knew I wanted to do this on my own, and he stayed out of it. He was incredibly supportive. His ego wasn’t (bruised) at all that he wasn’t in on it.”

But when Crowell heard what Cash felt was a nearly-completed version of the record, “He said, ‘Your album’s not finished.’ I was exhausted; I was done. But he just made me realize I wasn’t done. I was (mad), but he was right.”

Taking her husband’s advice, Cash recorded two additional songs, “On the Inside” and “Real Woman” (which the couple co-wrote) and substituted them for two other tracks that she now says would have clashed with the overall tone and concept of “Interiors.”

Cash said that “Interiors” was not directly influenced by the somber Woody Allen film of the same name.

“It was just the perfect title for these songs,” she said. “I sent Woody Allen the album and said, ‘I hope you don’t mind me borrowing the title for these songs.’ ” So far, Cash said, Allen hasn’t responded.

Her current tour (in which she is accompanied only by a bassist and guitarist) is something of a rarity: “I’ve always kept touring really limited, because of my kids. I spend a lot of time with them,” Cash said. That loss of performing time “is not a sacrifice,” Cash said. “Because I keep it to a minimum, I enjoy it when I do go out.”

Until stepping down recently, Cash also devoted herself to chairing the Nashville chapter of the Earth Communications Office, an organization that tries to mobilize celebrities on behalf of environmental causes. And she developed another artistic outlet: She said that she is having a showing of her watercolors and monoprints at a Nashville restaurant.

Commercial failure has a way of reining in some pop stars’ exploratory reach. If “Interiors” doesn’t catch hold, will Cash try to get back into the marketplace’s good graces by reverting to the somewhat sleeker, country-flavored, California-style soft rock that she has played in the past?

“That’s not the point of making records, for me,” she said. Wouldn’t radio programmers be more accepting if her next record were to be a little more upbeat?

Cash dismissed that notion too. For a brighter album to come out, her own interior landscape would have to change.

“I would have to be sick to death of being so depressing,” she said with a laugh.

* Rosanne Cash and Kevin Welch play Sunday night at 8 and 10:30 at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $22.50. Information: (714) 496-8930.