Rosanne Cash has already been to church by the time we meet for breakfast. As dawn broke on this wintry Parisian morning, the singer-songwriter slipped into the nearby Saint Sulpice church to pay homage to her mother, a lifelong Roman Catholic who died last May. “I respect it because she loved it, not because it does anything for me,” says Cash, a lapsed Catholic herself.

“Oh, I hate that word, lapsed!” she scoffs. “No, I made a conscious choice not to be a Catholic any more. I lapsed myself! I turned my card back in and said: thanks for the guilt, I won’t be needing it.”

Cash is good company. With two marriages, five children, award-winning albums and a riotous wild-child past behind her, she remains youthful and feisty at 50. She has carved a long career as a musician, author and political activist, but the cruel rules of fame mean that most of the world still knows her primarily as a daughter. The late Johnny Cash, one-man Mount Rushmore and all-American legend, still casts a long shadow over his eldest child.

Cash has been fielding questions about her royal bloodline for almost 30 years. This has clearly been bothersome at times, but with her latest album the connection is deliberate and unavoidable. Black Cadillac was written and recorded between 2003 and 2005, during which time she lost her father John, her mother Vivian Liberto Cash Distin, and her stepmother June Carter Cash. Hence the record is full of meditations on grief and mortality, but also quietly triumphant affirmations that love can outlast death.

“It’s not a tribute record to them,” Cash insists. “It’s more what happened to me. So it’s about loss but it’s also about ancestry and finding out how relationships can continue when one person’s not in the body, because I believe they do. If it’s founded on love, it has to continue.”

Bookended with haunting snippets of family recordings made by her father when Rosanne was a child, Black Cadillac is a tastefully sombre affair. The inner sleeve contains a poetically empty photomontage of the former Cash home, but overall the album feels less like a tearful farewell than a therapeutic act of closure.

“I hate to say it was therapy because to me that cheapens the songs,” Cash says. “There was a lot of work required to write and record them, but it was comforting. In fact there were times when I felt sorry for my siblings, that they weren’t writers, because it helped a lot to make sense of it.”

Cash stiffens a little when talk turns to James Mangold’s critically acclaimed Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line. Although its stars — Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon — were both personally approved by her late father and his second wife, June, Rosanne understandably has mixed feelings about Hollywood re-creating the chemical and emotional turbulence that tore her family apart when she was just 11.

“I was fearing you were going to ask me this,” Cash sighs. “My feeling is that story is not entertainment to me, you know? The dissolution of my parents’ marriage, my father’s drug addiction, I don’t need to see it on the screen. I remember it very well.”

The young Rosanne is represented in Walk the Line by ten-year-old Hailey Anne Nelson, while Ginnifer Goodwin plays her mother Vivian. Seeing private memories turned into public entertainment is an uncomfortable experience, but Cash stops short of condemning the whole project.

“No, my father wanted them to make it,” she shrugs. “It’s just unfortunate that he didn’t get to participate in the final version of the script. It’s as true as a Hollywood movie could be, I suppose. They get the facts right but they miss the larger truth sometimes.”

After her parents divorced in 1966, Cash spent her teens with her mother near Los Angeles. Vivian Liberto belonged to a strict Italian Catholic family and raised her three daughters with plenty of rules against which they were able to rebel. Accordingly, Rosanne began taking drugs at 14, soon after her father wrote a song about her entitled Rosanna’s Going Wild: “She’s feeling every new sensation/ Giving in to each temptation/ I know she’ll pay after a while.”

Like many celebrity kids, Cash might have blamed her drug problems on the bad example handed down by her pill-popping father, but she is wary of looking for genetic faultlines. “Possibly,” she frowns, “and yet at the same time I grew up in Southern California during the psychedelic era, so there were other factors at play. I was by nature a fairly rebellious child, so you can’t blame it on Dad. You can’t blame anything on anybody.”