For much of her life, Amy Helm has watched the spotlight beam onto some of rock and roll’s most legendary faces, including, of course, her father’s. Growing up as the daughter of Levon Helm, and in the company of the rest of The Band, she learned to admire, yet run away from, that spotlight. But now, with her solo debut album, Didn’t It Rain, she’s finally stepping into the light. And she’s glowing. It’s an August afternoon when Helm and her band, The Handsome Strangers, pull into a posh golf resort in Harwich, Mass., to play the Cape Cod Jazz Festival. She’s quickly intercepted by a half-dozen fans.

“It’s so nice to meet you, Moe,” she says warmly. “Yeah, I remember—that was a great show. See you tonight!” She hops into a golf cart, arriving at her room minutes later. She gasps. “No more Holiday Inn for me tonight,” she laughs. “I’ve arrived!”

Helm is used to nice hotels and big crowds. But her awe is genuine—for the first time in her life, the fans, the shows and the perks of the road are her own.

Helm was born to Levon and singer-songwriter Libby Titus in 1970. She was just shy of six years old when The Band invited Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Joni Mitchell and more onstage for their grand finale, captured on The Last Waltz. She calls Nov. 25, 1976 “a fairytale, but not for the reason the adults thought so.”

Standing backstage, “there was tons of food, candy, movies, toys, stuff to bounce on. There was so much to get into,” she says. The magnitude of her father’s rock group didn’t hit her as a kid. “My understanding was The Band was Rick Danko’s group and my dad just played drums,” she remembers.

Life as a Helm wasn’t all candy and bouncy castles. “There were plenty of times when [my dad] just wasn’t around. Big holes in our relationship,” she says. “I grew up around a lot of really brilliant and eccentric people who were both wonderful and absent. We were the kids of hippies who were doing their thing, big time.”

She left New York for Wisconsin to study psychology, and she considered the change of pace a welcome escape. Thus began her decade far from the rock-and-roll lifestyle in which she’d been raised. Helm earned her degree, then spent years waitressing and working in a flower shop. She was 28 when her dad was diagnosed with throat cancer, and “we began an extraordinary journey of coming back together,” she says.

Helm joined her dad’s band and began performing with him both on the road and as part of his legendary Midnight Ramble shows at The Barn just outside Woodstock, N.Y. She played on and co-produced her father’s Grammy-winning Dirt Farmer album in 2007. Their musical bond healed and renewed a relationship that had been dormant for years, and helped shape Amy into the commanding frontwoman she is today.

“We had so many conversations where his constant reminder was: ‘Have a good time; let it be joyful,’” she says. “Music is everything, and it’s a calling—a sacred and spiritual calling. But it’s also just music. Never take it too seriously. A bad gig doesn’t have to be the great failure in your narrative. Just get up and walk forward. My dad embodied that.”

Helm started writing and recording Didn’t It Rain six years ago with Byron Isaacs, who she worked with in her father’s group and in the New York alt-folk act Ollabelle (an outfit she co-founded in the early ‘00s). But shortly after they hit the road, she realized that their material’s onstage muscle wasn’t represented in their recordings. Back in the studio, Helm scrapped the initial takes and re-recorded Didn’t It Rain with her touring band, which includes Isaacs, drummer David Berger and guitarist Daniel Littleton.

The album took on a new life, with Helm’s cadre of talented friends contributing: Little Feat keyboardist Bill Payne, Marco Benevento, John Medeski and Larry Campbell all appear on the record. While Levon Helm passed away in April of 2012, his contributions remain—you’ll hear his familiar count-off on the Martha Scanlan cover “Spend Our Last Dime.” She also continues to honor her father’s legacy by performing with his Midnight Ramble Band and hosting her own jam sessions at his barn.

The final Didn’t It Rain is a roots-rock celebration, with Helm’s soulful vocals leaping atop rollicking percussion and the open-road echo of electric guitar. On “Sky’s Falling,” Helm sings, “The sky is falling down; don’t give up, babe. You’ve got to turn it around.” It’s the sound of an artist reaffirming the mission she’s circled around for much of her life.

The whole process was slow, “but I began to see what it felt like to make something that was mine. It began as a desire to explore myself, but evolved into a real need,” she says. “I needed to sing these songs.”

Onstage, Helm mixes cuts from Didn’t It Rain with favorites from her father’s catalog. “I see people smiling and singing the lyrics along with me,” she says, smiling herself. “I feel a deep, deep sense of humility to be in that place. We’re all singing together.”