FILTER ALBUMS
Demos found by Cash’s son lead new arrangements of songs a struggling star sang before Rick Rubin arrived
Johnny Cash ★★★★
Songwriter
MERCURY NASHVILLE/UME. CD/DL/LP
IN EARLY May, the crooning country star Randy Travis released Where That Came From, a glowing but sombre shuffle about a magic love he’d lost. It was a ringer for the deftly melodramatic tunes that made Travis, with his curiously curling Southern twang, one of the form’s key figures beginning in the mid-’80s. Diggin’ Up Bones, Forever And Ever, Amen, On The Other Hand: the new tune represented a renaissance for Travis, hingeing on the same deft lyrical play and idiosyncratic tone as those songs that made him famous. For the past decade, though, Travis has struggled to speak, let alone sing, after almost being killed following a string of infections and a massive stroke. Where That Came From, then, came from AI, which had absorbed the successes of his seemingly lost past to stake a potential future.
Expect much more of this from country music in years to come. Despite the continually widening scope of its sound and its sporadic steps toward inclusion, country has forever been defined by a kind of antediluvian idealism, a get-back-to-the-homestead nostalgia for the way things were. And so it goes now with an unwavering devotion to its bygone forebears. Hank Williams or Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn or Waylon Jennings, Charley Pride or George Jones: these are figures to be worshipped, not waylaid. And if there is a way for technology to revive the corpse’s voice, wager most estates will use it, especially as many of the genre’s marquee icons near what must be their final years.
In that context, it is tempting to dismiss Songwriter – the new album from Johnny Cash, who died two decades ago in Nashville at age 71 – as, at best, some desperate attempt to keep him around and, at worst, a cynical cash-in. In the early ’90s, Cash, like many of his fellow elders, was too old to be considered cool but too young to be unapologetically feted with the laurels of legacy. The ’80s had been rough-and-tumble for Cash: while daughter Rosanne flirted with spiky crossover success, her father faltered both during repeated rehab stints and a mangled relationship with Mercury Records. Amid that doldrum, in 1993, he cut some demos of new songs at LSI Studios, then being run by his stepdaughter and son-in-law. Fellow iconoclast Waylon Jennings added occasional harmonies, but the sessions were otherwise simple – Cash’s guitar and that singularly stentorian voice, a touch of tenderness slipping into his tone near the end of middle age.
