Album Reviews

Rosanne Cash’s moving, sometimes mysterious tribute to her late parents and step-mother June Carter Cash was, for me, last year’s most profound and affecting album. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t sat down to write about it until this year.

Despite the title, and the potential for morbidity and worse, triteness, Cash manages to explore loss, spirituality and the unknown with sensitivity and gentle resignation. Her sadness is expressed without seeking pity and the intimacy of her thoughts are exposed without discomfort or greeting card sentimentality.

The funereal title song sets the stage starkly: “It was a black Cadillac that drove you away, now everybody’s talking, but they don’t have much to say.” The song was written before Cash suffered the pain of losing her father, mother and step-mother in short order, but it does include a ghostly trumpet part reminiscent of the familiar one found on “Ring Of Fire.”

While her dad was more at ease with religion and comforted by it, Rosanne expresses ambivalence. In the wistful yet bemused “World Without Sound” she sings “I wish I was a Christian and knew what to believe, I could learn a lot of rules and put my mind at ease.” In the same fantasy-saturated song she sings, “I wish I was John Lennon, free as a bird, and all of you who sit and stare would hang on my every word.” The chorus damps the pleasant fantasies with “Who do I believe, in this world without sound, who do I believe once they put you in the ground? Who do I believe when the night’s falling down?”



Yet the album rises majestically above such a stark image of death’s finality. In “God Is In The Roses” Cash couples the potentially smarmy title line with “and in the thorns,” steering the song away from heavenly sappiness and into earthly reality. While the lines “The sun is on the cemetery, leaves are on the stones, there never was a place on earth that felt so much like home,” make for an obvious read, Cash adds mystery with this cryptic curiousity: “I love you like a brother, a father and a son, it may not last forever, but it never will be done, my whole world fits within the moment, I saw you be re-born.” Yet a few songs down the set list comes “Dreams Are Not My Home.” The album closes with “The Good Intent,” named after the ship in which the Cash family came to America.

The simmering but only occasionally somber songs veer back and forth between remembrances of growing up and mystical ones that take flight, bending time and space, like the sublime “I Was Watching You,” all in the service of coping with, and trying to understand the tantalizing mysteries of life and the burdens of loss. Cash delivers the material intimately and directly, her voice having taken on added depth and character with both age and having experienced the profound losses that inspired the album.

The curious production credits have the odd numbered songs recorded by Bill Bottrell, founder of the Tuesday Night Music Club, an informal amalgamation of musicians that helped create Sheryl Crow (for better or worse), and even ones by Cash’s husband, John Leventhal. Both are skilled producers and both know how to build songs by leaving plenty of open spaces among the acoustic and electric instruments. Leventhal’s production is clean and well-structured, yet more “studio-like,” compared to Bottrell’s, which are more organic-sounding, meaning the odd-numbered tracks exude an intimacy, purity and textural suppleness, the even ones do not, but both will please your ears. My old analog-loving friend Dan Schwartz plays bass on the Bottrell produced tracks.

At 51, Rosanne Cash has made the finest album of her recording career and one that’s easy to recommend highly without reservation for both music and sound. It has staying power.