A woman is in a man's home. the phone rings. It's another woman. Rosanne Cash sings: "Pick it up/Tell her you're home/I see your face turn into broken glass/Talking slow/Thinking fast." Perhaps while she was writing Interiors, her 1990 chronicle of heartbreak, Cash would have been less composed about the incident that frames "Roses in the Fire," one standout among The Wheel's many meditations on misfired romance. Having put the dissolution of one relationship under a highintensity microscope, she's able to seize the awkward drama in another. There's no need for an exhaustive account: "I know no man that I can trust," she sings with bitter finality.

The Wheel is hardly carefree, but no longer is Cash obsessed with conveying the minute details that made Interiors so daunting. The new vantage gives her personal experiences a universality Interiors sometimes lacked and makes her singer-songwriter shorthand a cathartic outlet, not merely a blunt weapon.

Most remarkable about these tightly scripted songs is Cash's resilience. She might, not know any men she trusts, but she hasn't stopped relating. Using the word crawl, which signified a state of emotional helplessness on each of her last three albums, she describes her internal journey in "Change Partners": "I crawl through an abyss/I struggle and resist/Somehow I break free/Someone becomes me."

That concept – going through hell to emerge fundamentally changed – also informs the refrain of "Sleeping in Paris" and turns up throughout "You Won't Let Me In," which measures the risks of personal transformation against the security of psychological walls. True, it's the same self-discovery angle Cash has worked before, but she speaks with new authority – she's clearly turned a corner with her grief, and unburdened, she's able to reflect on the pain and taste the rewards: "The heat of the questions that linger and stir," she sings on the disarmingly celebratory "Fire of the Newly Alive," "is the fire that enfolds us, a place to be cured."

Appropriately, Cash's latest curative fire walk is set to less somber music. The sparse arrangements offer moments of genuine exuberance that enhance Cash's resolve: As clearly as the lyrics, they show that Cash has outgrown the influence of her ex, Rodney Crowell. With the help of guitarist and coproducer John Leventhal, Cash has cooked up a balanced meal: There are two wind-swept ballads, two rock stomps enlivened by deft rural trappings, a few midtempo introspections and an outright country production number for a finale.

"If There's a God on My Side" closes The Wheel with an elaboration on the lonesome desperation Cash has hinted at elsewhere. It's a plea for a moment of clarity amid turmoil, and it uses the pathos of old-school country to maximum effect. The pain is palpable, and so is the doubt, and in these things lie the raw matter of Cash's art. (RS 652)

TOM MOON