When we last heard from Carlene Carter, President Bill Clinton was in his first term. King LeBron James was barely in double digits, age-wise that is.

And Shania Twain dominated the country album chart that year with "The Woman In Me."

Yup, it's been a long, long time since one of the heirs of the Carter Family heritage has been heard from musically - "Little Acts of Treason" was released in August 1995 to be exact.

Carter, the daughter of June Carter Cash and singer Carl Smith and stepdaughter of Johnny Cash, has been through quite a lot since "Little Acts..." hit stores.

Some of it involved acting, but a lot of it was not the kind of stuff you'd want to be known for - drugs (her second stint with substance abuse), the police blotter and a series of unfortunate, sometimes, tragic deaths in the family.

But now Carter, 52, is back in a big way on a small, but respected indie label, Yep Roc, with the release of the appropriately titled and highly personal "Stronger."

When asked the obvious "where have you been" question, Carter says in an interview from the California home of her producer and Doobie Brothers member John McFee, laughing, "I guess I was doing research for the last 13 years."

"That's a big question. How long do we got here? Part of had to do with the fact that I had written a bunch of new songs. I kind of got the bug again to be writing. I had done this play about my mom, my aunts and my grandma, and I got back to singing and performing again doing that, which got me inspired to want to go back into the studio. Then I hooked up with my friend John McFee. He took my songs, and we just made a record. Everything just clicked from the time we decided to do it until it's done."

But Carter, a friendly, upbeat sort on the phone, always doesn't shy away from talking about the darker side of her life.

She wondered whether she would return to music after her travails. "Yea, of course, I did," she says.

"I had gotten really burnt out on the road there, which caused me personal problems which is pretty well documented in the press."

"I experienced a lot of loss. I really didn't really know what I was supposed to be doing any more. All I was trying to do was put my life back together and have a life. I wasn't supposed to leave this world no matter how hard I seemed to try. I fell in love with that wonderful man, and I got married...I have my kids and grandkids and friends. I've got a wonderful husband. My life is completely different now. It really opened the door for me to be quiet enough to sit still enough to write these days."

Carter got her career going in the late 1970's doing rock and then switching over to country with sometimes a pop edge to it, while still maintaining her big, lively voice. It wasn't until 1990 that she had a few country hits with "I Fell in Love" and "Come on Back" and a few years later with "Every Little Thing."

Carter spent a lot of time on the concert trail and enjoyed a solid career in Europe, always able to play there even while not racking up the hits here.

"When I quit going on the road in '99 I think, I was really burned out. I had been home 27 days the year before. I lived in three houses...I had gone on the road and from house to house dusting my houses."

"I wasn't a clean freak or anything. I'd spend my two days off there dusting. It just wasn't really a home life at all. With all the personal issues with drugs and Howie's drug problems and trying to be in a relationship with that and trying also to get my shit together, it became too much. I just quit."

"Howie" was Howie Epstein, formerly a member of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers and Carter's longstanding boyfriend. He produced her hit 1990 disc "I Fell in Love" and her follow-up three years later, "Little Love Letters."

They were together for 16 years, although he does not count as one of her four husbands (British pop singer Nick Lowe does - they were married from 1979-90).

Carter indicates her heart just wasn't in performing and music during this period.

"I always want to be genuine to my audience, genuine on stage. It made me feel so bad like I was cheating my fans and cheating people who paid to see me. I had these little kids, who loved the Barbie doll aspect to me, and I would look at them and feel so guilty about myself, I had to quit...I need to pull back. I needed to quit. I needed to get my life together. I didn't want to take it for granted."

"When I'm on stage, I always appreciate the fact that I am able to make a living doing what I love doing. I was hurrying through songs. I'd be in the second verse of a song, I would be like, 'when's this going to be this over?' I felt really bad about myself. It fueled my self-destruction too."

"I was on automatic, and I don't want to be on automatic. I want to be present and want to experience the whole thing. Every time you play live music, it's a different experience. Their (the audience's) reaction is different than the audience the night before. It's an energy thing. It's a spiritual thing. It really is. I have a responsibility to show up and do my thing. I really believe that whatever I have to offer doesn't come from me. It comes from somewhere else. I'm just the vessel."

Carter senses she's getting a bit too serious in thinking about music, performing and life. "I'm getting all cosmic here, but really truly I believe this stuff. I'm not all Zen and everything. I have all tons of character flaws." she opines.

"It's not like I've lived this monk life. I try not to take for granted the gift I've been given and share music with people maybe touch somebody in some way and make them laugh or cry or whatever."

"I didn't take it for granted. It became a little bit too much work...It had never really felt like work, but I have never taken for it granted."

"I went down another road for awhile, and it took me awhile to get back out of that. It's hard. It's really hard. I can't pooh pooh it away and say it was a part of my life. It was a huge mess of my life for awhile there. I totally have to acknowledge it every day."

"Drugs and relationship problems and just being too stressed out. Emotional stuff. But then when all this stuff happened...within an eight-month period I think it was...I just couldn't keep it together. I don't know people who coulda. I have some people in my family who say they did, but I beg to differ."

Epstein had a very serious drug problem, only Carter says she was unaware of it. The drugs got him kicked out of the Heartbreakers. It also led to he and Carter getting busted in Santa Fe, N.M. in 2001 - she for possession of heroin and both for possessing a stolen vehicle. Epstein died Feb. 23, 2003, reportedly of complications from drug use. "You hang out with the barber enough," says Carter of her use of drugs. "You're going to get a haircut."

Then June Carter Cash died in May 2003 followed six months later by her husband Johnny. Carter's sister, Rosey Nix Adams, died that October at 45 in a trailer after being involved in drugs.

Carter took awhile to get her life back together, thinking she may quit music.

But first she got rid of the drugs. "It wasn't fun any more," she says. "I was bored with it." She also felt it hurt her musical creativity.

"I had some great friends who sent me off to get help. I'm really proud to say I haven't used drugs in a very long time...It's been 4 1/2 years. I couldn't continue doing it. It didn't work for me anymore...That worked for a little while, but then it started wearing on me. I never ate. All I ever ate was ice cream."

Carter moved to Nashville for a few years, performing in "Wildwood Flowers: The June Carter Story" in Nashville, which opened a few doors for her.

"I kind of got the bug again. I started talking with my little brother, John Carter, about doing something in the studio." John Carter Cash works in Nashville as a producer.

"I wanted to use the studio to do demos. He wanted to produce me, but...we put down the whole album...I did all the demos in seven days, which is really quick."

"From there, I went out on the road. I pressed it. It was very rough. He has a different approach to making records."

Carter jokes that her time in her half-brother's studio wasn't free as she paid him for using it.

Carter thought about getting someone to produce her and came up with McFee. She worked with 30 years ago and later sang vocals when he was in country rock band Southern Pacific on the hit "Time's Up."

"Through all my lives, they've seen me all kinds of shape and all kinds of ways, and we've made all kinds of music together," says Carter of McFee and his wife. "I've trusted him so much."

They recorded the album. "We started fresh. He did so much work on this. He saved my ass. It was mutually rewarding for both of us."

Carter says, laughing, she usually had recorded "with whoever I dated, and they happened to be a producer."

After such a long time off, did Carter feel comfortable in the studio?

"I felt like I never left except maybe I have a little more appreciation for it because I missed it. I was scared that it would hurt to sing these things because they're really personal, but I needed to sing them because they're really good."

"Any performer that I've ever talked with, any time you go away for awhile, whether you take a year off or take 10 years off, when you go back on stage, I'm never nervous, but there's little thing (of thinking) 'what If I don't remember how to do it?'"

Carter also had moved back to California from Nashville by this point with husband number four, Joseph Breen, who had acted in soap operas.

Carter started writing songs when she met Breen about 3 1/2 years ago.

"The first song I wrote was 'Bring Love,' (the song appears on "Stronger," a love song to Breen)...I got inspired."

"We were hanging out in the same group of people," says Carter. "We became friends first. Then it was a little bit before we consummated (the relationship), another year before we got married. It's really important that we live together a year before we got married. I just really wanted this to be it, which it is. I was kind of done. I didn't really want to date or have a boyfriend or anything. He was irresistible. So cute and so funny and smart and talented. Easy on the eyes."

"Nothing's really working for us in Nashville. (Breen) wanted to build houses. We figured would move to Covelo, which is, 4 1/2 hours north of San Francisco. We just decided to take a leap of faith and just go. We (had) lived in this house for two years, and we packed everything we had and moved."

"It's a really tiny tiny town, 800 people," she says. With "Stronger," Carter is on Yep Roc, home to such acts as Nick Lowe and Jim Lauderdale.

"I've always had the umbrella of the big record company thing, but it's been really freeing to not have that because I've been able to do whatever I wanted to do. Fortunately, my money from the grave - 'Will the Circle Be Unbroken' money that I get - is what's paid for this record. I know my grandmother and my mom would be so happy for that. I've carried on my legacy by making new music that's Carter family music."

"I thought it was going to hurt too much...I wasn't sure I had the stamina to wanna boot back up. I was going to make a record that we really liked, not one that I had to worry about what the record company thought about or if there was a single or the fact that I'm not 30 years old any more or any of that bullshit. Not that I weigh 100 pounds, all of these silly things they put on you when you're in the big record company world. We're still young. We're still rocking. I wanted to do it the way I liked it...without someone breathing down our necks. We delivered it just as it is."

"Everything was pretty much the way we wanted it. That felt really good...being the master of your own creativity and destiny."

"We can't control who's going to listen to it or who's going to like it," says Carter.

Yep Roc head Glenn Dicker admits the record came his way out of the blue, or so he thought. He says he was "kind of surprised because I wasn't really thinking about her at all. I wasn't trying to convince her to make a record. The record was done more or less. They reached out to us. When I got it, I listened to it. I thought it was really good. I thought the songs were really strong."

Dicker acknowledges that unbeknownst to him, Lowe recommended Carter contact his label, Yep Roc.

Carter wastes no time in getting personal on "Stronger" with the opening song, "The Bitter End." The song talks about getting hitched at 15, a mistake.

And yes, the song is autobiographical as Carter got married when she was a teen and quickly had a child.

"You're either stupid or pregnant," says Carter, joking, about getting married as a young teen, before adding, "I was both. I really thought I was madly in love. I was very into church, and I thought I was going to go to hell."

"That song is very personal, but there's nothing in it that hasn't been publicly documented," she says laughing.

Carter goes back in time to 1980 with a remake of "I'm So Cool." The new version is very different, far less pop oriented. There are even a few different words, something Carter didn't even realize until told.

"It still flied after all these years, actually in some ways even more," says Carter. "It was never a serious song. It was completely tongue in cheek, taking the piss out of myself."

Carter says she was "thrilled" with the results. "I didn't know exactly how we were going to do it...It's more edgy. The original was only acoustic guitar, electric guitar, bass, drums and me, and it was all live. No overdubs or anything. It was super easy. This is a lot bigger and a lot bolder. I think it needed to be brought up to today."

She goes a bit further back than that with "It Takes One to Know Me." Carter never recorded the song, but her step dad did. Carter wrote it for Johnny Cash when she was 19 as a birthday present for him.

"It was when I first started writing. I didn't have enough money for a birthday gift...Whenever they had a party, they had a guitar pull where everyone would pass the guitar around, and you would have to sing something, or you had to tell a story. That night, I sang my song for him as a birthday present from me."

"He recorded it with mama as a duet, and we didn't even know about it until after they passed away. We didn't even know it was in the vault."

The song ended up appearing on his box set "The Legend" in 2005; then on his "Personal File" CD in 2006.

"John Carter sent it to me to put my voice on (the recording), and I got to sing with them after they had both left this world," Carter recalls. "Oh man, it was intense, and it also hadn't been that long since they'd passed away...It might've been just a year. It was hard, but it was also great - where something is so wonderful and you hurt so bad."

What was life like in the Carter/Smith/Cash households?

"It was great actually," says Carter of life with her parents. June Carter Cash and Smith split when Carlene was about two. Smith later married singer Goldie Hill. Carter split her time between her parents.

"Mama toured a lot. Even when daddy was on tour, I would stay with Goldie a lot. I had my sister and two brothers on the farm. Daddy lived on the farm with horses I was completely crazy about. I was with daddy a lot, and I was with mommy a lot. They were really cool about it. Nobody talked bad about each other...I was really lucky, and I had a whole bunch of parents that were all great. I really miss my step mom Goldie."

As for the pressure of being part of the first family of country music, "It never bothered me honestly. I always felt blessed by it. I never felt the pressure of it. I felt the responsibility. I felt I needed to do my part to carry on the music...the rite of passage stuff. But I never was intimidated by it. It was just family. People would always interpret that was (why) I was wild or that's why I acted that way. But honestly I've been in therapy, and that's not it."

"I got to learn so much cool stuff and travel the world and had the greatest parents."

"It wasn't all what people might think - lifestyles of the rich and famous. Our life did drastically change when she married John. We always had great Christmases. Real family oriented stuff."

The title track closes the disc, a sad ending about loss given that it's about her late sister.

"That had to do a lot with much pain I was in after losing all those people. The cherry on the top - the worst possible thing in the world was to lose my baby sister. As much as it hurts to lose a partner or parent, those things are kind of expected, but losing your sister who's younger than you is almost like losing a kid. When we were growing up, every picture you see of us, I'm holding her hand. I was supposed to take care of her. That was very devastating to lose her. I threw up my hands...I got to pick up myself here because this is going to kill me. I have to turn it around and make it stronger somehow."

"You have to have faith that this is going to happen for some reason, or you can't make any sense of it - why my little sister died and why am I still here? Survivor's guilt. I miss her every day. I think about her every day."

Adams, who had drug problems, was found with another person in a trailer.

"It was not a surprise," says Carter of her sister's death. "No, it was not a surprise. It was a pretty sad story. Nobody really knows exactly what happened, which makes it even harder. The night when I got the call that she was gone, I was supposed to be flying out to get her in treatment because she was a little bit out of control. She was living in that little dinky bus thing...and they were not doing as well as they should be doing."

"I was getting ready to (take her to the hospital). It was that bad...She had once said to me after mama died, she said, 'Carlene, my life is over'. I said, 'What? You're younger than me'...It's really hard."

Carter made "Stronger" on her own terms, and she says that's how the future will be also. "I can go still go to Europe and still bring 4,000, 5,000 seats or 10,000 people festivals and make great money. In America, country music is getting saturated with new artists. Record buyers are a lot younger...I'm basically starting all over again, which is fine. That's okay. This way, I can pick and choose what I want to do. I'm not going to do the whole running ragged thing again. I still want to have a life and be happy and doing what I'm doing...I'm taking it slow. Everything's happening the way it's supposed to happen so far."

She has tour dates in Austria, Sweden, Norway and other European countries, "my usual summer kind of stuff already," she says. Getting U.S. dates has proven harder, apparently because of being MIA.

Carter does not seem fazed at this stage of her career about the new CD. "I'm not nervous. I've never put any stock into being nervous about any of this stuff. You write it. You love it. You do it the best you can, and you just hope people get to hear it. Dwelling and worrying (about it) if I do that, I would never sleep, and I can't go through that."

Speaking about her family, "I've really learned a lot of about this stuff from them - it's not being consumed with the outcome so much as the process."

With "Stronger" under her belt, will Carlene Carter fans be waiting another 13 years for new music?

"Absolutely not," Carter promises. "I'm already on it."