Rosanne Cash lives in a world of details where each word counts. On “She Remembers Everything” (Blue Note), she chisels out small stories, little vignettes of a life that can see the final turn ahead.

After ruling the ’80s country charts with a whip-smart blend of tradition and pop songcraft tinged with heartache, Cash veered into more introspective art songs with “Interiors” in 1990 and never looked back, even though her days as a commercial juggernaut came to an end. With “She Remembers Everything,” her first album in four years, the singer navigates the uncertainty of today.

It toggles between stark reality and more abstract images, sometimes blending them in ways enhanced by the production. There is the random violence chronicled in “8 Gods of Harlem,” which plays out like a small three-person play with the voices of Elvis Costello and Kris Kristofferson. In “Particle and Wave,” the wider view telescopes down to what matters: a simple embrace, the face of a loved one, amid “this rainbow of suffering.”

There are confrontations with mortality, meditations on a marriage, a reassessment of what matters. The road turns on the album’s briskest track, “Not Many Miles to Go,” in which ringing guitars mask the wistfulness of the lyrics. Cash provides a steadfast perspective in a song that could easily sink into the maudlin.

The album peaks when Cash broadens her sound to mirror the turbulence. For decades, her albums have been produced by John Leventhal, her husband and an ace multi-instrumentalist and songwriter in his own right. This time, Leventhal shares the production responsibilities with Tucker Martine, who has worked with artists ranging from Neko Case to the Decemberists.

Martine steers the songs out of an electro-folk Americana pocket and into more atmospheric terrain. Treble-soaked guitar settles over “The Only Thing Worth Fighting For” like an overcast afternoon, as Cash sinks into “my shadow songs, my deep regret.” Drum cymbals shiver and a vibraphone reverberates in the haunted house that is “My Least Favorite Life.” Martine puts Cash in the middle of a Brecht-Weil cabaret or a David Lynch movie as she sings, “The nights that I twist on the rack is the time that I feel most at home.”

Cash conveys longing without wallowing in it. She never sounds as if she’s selling something, in large measure because the truth in these songs rarely needs embellishing. On the sparse “Everyone But Me,” shadowed by Levanthal’s piano, Cash channels the spirit of a woman who devoted her life to pleasing “everyone … everyone but me.”

It sets up the devastating title track, co-written by Sam Phillips, in which Martine conjures another cinematic backdrop for a mystery. “Who knows who she used to be before it all went dark?” Cash sings. The song holds a secret, its impact heightened by the ambiguity that surrounds it. The phrase, “She remembers everything,” is also a statement of faith, a purposefulness that resonates against the real-world churn of she-said he-said dismissals. In Cash’s telling, doubt turns to empathy and finally, belief.

greg@gregkot.com