Pop Music : Confessional Cash in Close-Up Concert

“Oh my gosh, I can’t believe I’m gonna do this song in front of my mother ,” said a suddenly reticent Rosanne Cash, whose mom was indeed one of 150 packing the tiny back room at McCabe’s for the first of the country-pop star’s two acoustic shows there Friday.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe that Cash would perform some of these songs in front of anyone, much less parents and paying strangers, given lyrics even more brazenly, apparently confessional than, say, Sinead O’Connor’s. Her latest and most intimate album, “Interiors,” largely about a marriage on the rocks, has all the brutal, unpretentious hallmarks of a diary.

Based in firsthand experience or not, Cash’s songs bear the painful ring of personal truth and are unlike anything else in the country field (to which she only marginally belongs). She takes all the fun out of cheatin’ songs--and rightly so.

If the intense “Interiors,” with its melancholy tales of marital miscommunication and infidelity, has a drawback in its utter lack of levity, it was not such a problem in the close-up, let’s-talk environs of McCabe’s.

The assuredly autobiographical “Road Widow” (bemoaning being in her sexual prime while hubby is out on tour) provided needed laughs amid the woe. And in the idealistic feminist anthem “Real Woman,” which has Cash promising “I don’t want to use my charm to disarm you,” she quietly added, “Well, maybe.”

The hushed songs sounded even finer live, accompanied only by Steuart Smith’s guitar and Jim Hanson’s bass, and broken up by Cash’s wry, challenging patter.