Alicia Witt is mulling what to call the new album she has just about ready for release, and what she will do as far as a performance schedule to support it. It's a good time for the red-haired actress/singer be focusing on the music side of her career, given the intensity of, and attention surrounding, her turn as Wendy, "the smart one" of the violent, heroin-smuggling Crowe family on the fifth season of FX's "Justified."

As viewers know, Wendy worked the law on behalf of her miscreant siblings to impressive effect, despite not really being a lawyer. Then big bad brother Daryl (Michael Rapaport) proved ready to allow Wendy's teenage son (Jacob Lofland) to take the rap for a murder, and, well, we'll just say she took care of things.

All together, it was a dynamic and memorable season for Witt.

"I haven't figured out what I'm going to do next, acting-wise. All I keep looking for are parts that I haven't done before and parts that are going to challenge me in some way. And honestly, having just worked on 'Justified,' I feel like that's a hard act to follow," notes the red-haired beauty.

According to Alicia, she and Rapaport didn't know what was to become of their characters at the beginning of the season.

"The relationship that Mike and I created throughout the episodes that we had together was so complicated," she says. "There was so much love there, and obviously a history of having grown up together and having been all that each other has. But there was also such an element of abuse. Honestly, I felt that in the very first episode — even though it didn't make any sense," she goes on.

Witt says she is going to check with the series writers at some point, to find out "if they could tell that I felt that way and if it had anything to do with the relationship between Wendy and Daryl ending up going the way it did. I always felt there was a sense of being afraid of what Daryl was capable of. And when I was playing Wendy I felt like I loved him, but I was also really scared and had this almost abused woman feeling toward him. My brain knew that what he was saying didn't make sense and that he could hurt me, but that I didn't quite have the strength to get away from him."

The punch-throwing confrontation that ended with Daryl's brutal beating of Wendy didn't hurt her at all, physically, Witt says. That fight scene was expertly choreographed. Psychically — that was another matter.

She admits, "I was really drained after a lot of those days on set, because of the level of emotional work that was going on there. It just got more so as the episodes got written and we got further along in the season. It was the kind of work that, well, I tried really hard not to take the work home with me."

Witt, who was as discovered as a child actress by filmmaker David Lynch, who cast her as Alia Atreides in his film "Dune" (1984), says that after all these years of acting, she is well aware of the potential for problems when actors fail to deal with the impact of playing emotional extremes all day. "You take it out on someone you love, or you find yourself feeling incredibly depressed when everything is going good in your own life — that kind of thing," she says. "I think I'm better at being able to say, 'I'm just exhausted. I need to stay home and not do anything and lie on the couch for a few hours.'

"But then, with 'Justified,' there was also this really rare sense of satisfaction at the end of those days as well. Every time we had one of those tricky scenes to film, one of the scenes where we go at each other and beat each other up — and especially the finale — I went home tired but feeling like there was not a single thing that I could have done differently or that didn't go as well as I hoped it would."

Critics have called the fifth season a lesser season of the award-winning Timothy Olyphant starrer — a season whose purpose seemed at least in part to be setting up the sixth and final season of the show. Still, it certainly had its breath-catching moments and tremendous acting, and a lesser season of "Justified" is still better than many a drama on the television landscape.

So what will be next for Witt in the acting realm? Perhaps a change-up, like a romantic comedy?

"That would be fun. I actually really love doing those," she says, brightening. "There was a Hallmark movie I did that came out this past Christmas ("A Very Merry Mix-Up") that I'm actually really proud of. It was so fun — obviously the opposite of 'Justified' and the fear you're going to take your work home in a bad way. You want to bring the feeling home with the Hallmark Channel movie. It was just happy. You get to have Christmas lights everywhere in April, and I had a great time doing that. Something that I would love to do that I've never had the chance to do is a really over-the-top ridiculous slapstick comedy."

Her 2013 "Cold Turkey" — in which she played the extra-eccentric daughter among an eccentric family gathering for Thanksgiving — had its zany moments. "Away From Here," an intense drama also released last year, teamed her with Nick Stahl in a story of a former youth minister trying to rebuild his life after serving six years in prison for statutory rape.

The performer, whose credits range from films including "Mr. Holland's Opus" and "Citizen Ruth" to TV's "Friday Night Lights" and "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," has kept her career as a pop singer-songwriter going all the way along.

"That's something that I'm constantly doing. I'm always writing new songs," says Witt, who has shown up on a number of red carpets in the last two years looking quite happy and lovey-dovey with beau and collaborator Ben Folds.

"The last thing I wrote was something I was inspired by 'Justified' to write. I actually collaborated with T.O.N.E-z, who wrote the theme song for the show," she says. "We actually met at the premiere party and he and I sort of simultaneously emailed each other a few days later. I had just finished a song I wanted him to rap the verses of, and he had a song that he had completely written except he needed a chorus, so I did that song with him which has already come out. It's called 'My Baby Girl.' And then there's my song. It's all recorded, but didn't quite fit into the finale of this season — but I'm told it will probably have a place in the next season of 'Justified.'"

She wrote the song from her character's point of view, "before I knew exactly what was happening in the finale," she says. "It's basically about getting away from a background that keeps you in a place where you don't want to spend the rest of your life. You're trying to make a better life and get away from all the crap that surrounds you."

Just don't go to the extremes Wendy did.