Lisa Marie Presley had to go to England to find her way back to the roots of American music -- country, blues and gospel.

Her father, Elvis Presley, had somehow synthesized those musical forms and helped create rock 'n' roll.

His daughter, however, who didn't make her first album until she was 35 years old, had staked her musical reputation on glossy pop music long on style but short on substance.

When Presley, who will perform with her band Sunday night at the Chameleon Club in downtown Lancaster, realized a few years ago that she wanted to make a new album -- her third -- she decided she needed a change in direction.

"I knew I couldn't be in Los Angeles doing it anymore," Presley says during a telephone interview from her LA home. "I couldn't be pushed into pop, and told to dress this way and look that way and get with this hit writer. I couldn't play that. I was sick of the whole thing."

Presley, 44, who is married to Michael Lockwood, a British music producer, went to England to work with some songwriters who had been recruited by her husband.

It clicked and Presley and her collaborators cranked out about 30 songs over an eight-month period, 11 of which wound up on her album "Storm & Grace," released in May.

"When I first started writing, I started writing as I used to write, very similar to the first two albums," Presley says. "It was more rock, harder stuff -- then I had a breakthrough. I realized I had been hiding behind a lot of production."

She stripped the sound back and ended up with a batch of songs that rightfully can be called roots music. When she returned to the U.S. to record them, she wound up in the studio of T-Bone Burnett, the go-to producer of roots music who won a Grammy for his groundbreaking work on the soundtrack to the movie "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

"It's really natural for me," Presley says. "I was raised in country music and blues and rock 'n' roll and gospel. It's not like it wasn't in me."

"Storm & Grace," arguably her best album, is certainly her most authentic. The material, which is dark and downcast, suits her dusky voice.

Though she collaborates to create the musical settings for her songs, Presley says she writes all of the lyrics.

"My lyrics usually can be pretty dark and tormented," she says. "There's usually something I'm tormented about, but there's also this beautiful-sadness thing that I'm a fan of in music.

"When I'm writing, it's cathartic. It's therapeutic and I'm processing something. I am not, generally speaking, a miserably dark person at all."

The darkness of "Storm & Grace" does contrast with what would seem to be the general sunniness of Presley's life at this point.

Presley -- who has been married four times, most famously to the late Michael Jackson and actor Nicholas Cage -- and Lockwood, her current husband, are the parents of 4-year-old twin girls (she also has two grown children from her first marriage).

They split their time between the home in LA and one in Tunbridge Wells, England, which they bought in 2010.

"I love England," she says. "It's a different atmosphere for the children. I just think it's a nice break. Los Angeles can be too highly concentrated in terms of celebrity and stuff I don't really want them getting obsessed with.

"It's a beautiful place for them. But then the grandparents miss out, so we have to come back a lot."

Presley says she and her mother, Priscilla Presley, who split from her father in 1972, five years before he died, have a great relationship. "She's the first person I call if anything happens," Presley says of her mother.

She also says she loves going back to Memphis. Presley returned this summer to participate in a concert marking the 35th anniversary of her father's death.

With the help of some old concert footage, she sang a "duet" with him on the song "I Love You Because."

"There's so much interest and love out there, so it's labor of love that I do them (the duets) every five years," Presley says. "It's always fun and exciting to come up with something new. This was a really sweet, fun one to do as well."

And she does find it odd that Graceland, where she spent time as a child and which she now owns, has become one of the top tourist destinations in the country, drawing about 600,000 visitors a year

"I think it would be strange for anyone to have their childhood home kind of encapsulated for eternity," she says. "It's untouched and exactly like it was. That doesn't happen very often. It's very special."

For now, Presley says she plans to spend a lot of time on the road promoting her new album. She says she especially enjoys playing intimate venues like the Chameleon.

"There's a give-and-take relationship between me and the audience, and it's direct," she says. "There's instant gratification for both. It's exciting for me. It's a challenge for me, too, which I also like."

Lisa Marie Presley

Sun. 7 p.m. $18, $20

Chameleon Club

223 N. Water St., 393-7133

www.chameleonclub.net

jferguson@lnpnews.com