Johnny Cash: Songwriter album review

When Johnny Cash teamed up with Rick Rubin for 1994’s American Recordingstheir partnership launched one of the great final acts of 20th-century American music. Yet such a comeback would have seemed extremely unlikely at the dawn of the ’90s. Left without a major label for the first time since 1958, Cash had resigned himself to the ignominious depths of Branson, Missouri, the Ozark town known for its tacky theaters housing fading stars of yesteryear. The country icon couldn’t even get it right. His financial backing collapsed before the Johnny Cash Theatre opened in the summer of 1992. When he finally played the venue a year later, he was forced to replace his new star attraction: the famous lounge lizard Wayne Newton.

The unreleased demos on Songwritera new posthumous album, sheds light on that comeback, a narrative so enduring it seems set in stone today. The demos are from sessions at Nashville’s LSI Studios, where Cash moved in the early ’90s to record a series of new songs. John Carter Cash, the only child of Johnny and June Carter Cash, recently discovered the recordings, but the artist’s intentions for them remain unclear. Cash’s decision to record at LSI may have been partly altruistic, as it was jointly owned by his stepdaughter Rosie and her then-husband Mike Daniel, and thus an easy way to funnel funds to them. It’s also possible that the demos were intended to persuade another label to sign the country veteran, a goal that was achieved by other means once Cash met Rubin in 1993.

Two of the pieces on Songwriter“Drive On” and “Like a Soldier” also appear on American Recordingsand their simultaneous presence illuminates the distance between the two projects. These are two of the lightest moments of reserve, stoic American recordings and two of the most important songs of the Songwritera record that leaves ample room for Cash’s humor and sentimentality, character traits that Rubin resolutely avoided. The two qualities combine on “I Love You Tonite,” a love letter to June Carter Cash in which he marvels that they have survived the decades and wonders if they will survive into the new millennium.

Cash has deep concerns—he questions the fate of the planet in “Hello Out There”—but he generally spends Songwriter He works on a smaller scale, writing character sketches of single mothers buoyed by their love for James Taylor, flirting with a woman at the laundromat (“Well Alright”), and penning an ode to all the pretty girls in Little Rock. There’s no sense of foreboding here; it’s as light and disjointed as any of the LPs he recorded during his final days at Columbia in the early 1980s or the unfairly maligned Mercury records of the decade’s end.