On the cover of American Recordings, Johnny Cash's stunning 1994 comeback album, Man in Black sits squarely between Sin and Redemption — literally, after he named the black and white dogs that flank him as he stares into your soul. At the time, he also felt between sin and redemption metaphorically and the album was a leap of faith. The new archival collection, Songwriterwhich contains demos Cash recorded in 1993 a few months before American Recordingspresents an alternate history of the period when absolution still felt out of reach, and many of the songs find Cash running through the same ebb and flow that nearly wiped out his career in the '80s and early '90s.
The key to understanding the entire collection lies in “Like a Soldier,” a survival tune that Cash recorded on both Songwriter and American Recordings sessions. On the tune, he sounds surprised he's singing at all: “I've said a hundred times that I should have died,” he blatantly suggests in one verse, while in another, he croons, “the spoils of my victory are you,” for sure. a nod to his long-suffering wife, June Carter Cash. His lyrics are brutal, but when he recorded it for 1994 American Recordings, he sang the chorus, “I'm like a soldier who overcomes war,” hope shining through the weight of his basso profundo. He sang it straight – no electric guitar chickaboom, no galloping snare, no Ennio Morricone soprano wafting behind him – it was just his voice and guitar, his lyrics and chords. It's familiar and inspiring.
When he recorded the song for the Songwriter session, however, he had decided to keep it to himself. It's big and inviting and lacks punch, and he knew it.
After refusing to jump into the urban cowboys and outlaw country bands of the eighties, the great river that was once his career had dripped (not counting the Robber album). His record company wanted nothing to do with him so he tried to blow up his entire career with self-parody “The chicken with the blacks” in 1986, and when he tried to get serious with another label, the records bombed. (Water from the house's wells it still sounds great, though.) Cash would have retired if he hadn't felt compelled to provide for his musicians and family, according to Robert Hillburn's 2013 biography.
So Cash continued to tour and write songs and eventually met producer Rick Rubin in 1993. Rubin was best known at the time for records by the Beastie Boys, Chili Peppers, Slayer and Andrew “Dice” Clay. Somehow he convinced Cash that he understood the country too. He saved Cash's career simply by asking Cash to sing his favorite songs with only a guitar to accompany him, and those songs became American Recordings. In his autobiography, Cash described the sound as “slow and alone in a room”, but the simplicity of the sound, combined with some comically macabre lyrics (even for Cash), turned him into an alternative icon at the age of 61 .
So Songwriter asks the question: What would Johnny Cash have sounded like if he had never met Rubin? In early 1993, that same year he met Rubin, Cash and various band members who cut about a dozen demo songs he had written at LSI Studios in Nashville. For Songwriter, Cash's son, producer and guitarist John Carter Cash wiped everything from those sessions (including, unfortunately, WS “Fluke” Holland's drums) except for Cash's voice, and assembled musicians to re-record the instrumentation with guest appearances by Vince Gill, Marty Stuart, and Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys. His intention was to give the recordings a supposedly more modern sound — but it still doesn't fit the cowboy boot. American Recordings.
The songs themselves are a mixed bag, some showing promise and others showing disappointment. “Like a Soldier,” as a song, still sounds soulful, but begins with an electric guitar twist that harkens back to openers “Folsom Prison Blues” and “I Walk the Line.” Waylon Jennings sings backup vocals, sweetening the chorus, but even these lush and rich instrumentals lack the power and immediacy of the better-known American Recordings version.
Similarly, “Drive On”—another tune that Cash didn't feel comfortable officially recording until he met Rubin—carries a kind of Three Dog Night, “Mama Told Me (Not to Come)” psychedelic swamp-rock arrangement that undermines the immediacy of the Rubin version. If these songs were released in this form, they might still be beloved, but they wouldn't have packed the punch they did with just Cash's voice and guitar.
In 1991, Cash had released his last album before Rubin, The Mystery of Life — a record he thought so little of that he mistyped the title in his autobiography, misnaming it The meaning of life. His big covers sound like Cash-by-numbers, and Cash's originals, aside from the re-recordings of “Hey Porter” and “Wanted Man,” sound just as uninspired. The innovation song “Beans for breakfast” (as in “Beans for breakfast once again, hard to eat out of the can”) lands a spot on “The Chicken in Black,” showing where his state of mind was at the time. So it's strange to think that he was selfishly holding on to great songs like “Like a Soldier” and “Drive On.”
Ironically, the best songs Songwriter which Rubin did not later record American or its sequels have a sense of novelty. The rockabilly pickup line, “Well, All Right,” finds Cash chatting up a woman on the “laundry mat” and eventually taking her home — well, all right! He helps, “mmm-mmm-mmm,” and Stewart's guitar echoes the melody behind him, creating a song that needs more orchestration. Meanwhile, on “She Sang Sweet Baby James,” Cash tells the story of a trucker mother separated from her child, singing James Taylor's “Sweet Baby James” for comfort. He even sings a lot and like a lullaby similar to Taylor (a feat for Cash), and the song probably could have benefited from a lighter arrangement like Taylor's “Sweet Baby James,” rather than the mandolin spaghetti western tremolo in Songwriter.
The rest of the songs are good, but none of them shine like lost gems from Cash's softer days. The elegy of lost love “Spotlight” benefits from Auerbach's bluesy guitar solo, but the music largely falls short of Cash's poignant line, “Let me feel like humming her will be all right.” “I Love You Tonite,” also featuring Jennings, is a sweet love song for June, but the percussion and wailing guitar still sound dated even though it was recently recorded, while another ode to June and her mother, “Poor Valley Girl,” echoes the 1950s. A re-recording of “Sing It Pretty Sue” sounds pretty good, but it never beats the original from 1962 The Sound of Johnny Cash.
The collection's biggest misfit, “Hello Out There,” finds Cash singing cosmically about the Earth losing its luster, echoing his own lyrics over a skip beat (as in the orchestral organ) before turning into an anthem for the King who restores the kingdom of Earth. The original demo it's still online, and while it lacks some of the drama of the new recording, specifically the religious turn in the bridge, it shows that Cash's mindset at the time was still focused on towing the mellow, bouncy mids of dirt-country he went to early on of the 80s.
The title of the collection, Songwriter, suggests that John Carter Cash wanted to showcase his father's ability as a songwriter, a talent that was well demonstrated by the time he wrote these songs. The Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame had already inducted Cash in 1977, citing songs like “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Get Rhythm” and “I Walk the Line” as reasons for induction. None of the songs here reach the level of these classics. Instead, they show Cash dissecting his place in the strata of country music at a time when Billy Ray Cyrus and Garth Brooks were bridging dubious, Cash-breed traditional country with pop music to untold success and it was still Chicken in Black .
Cash would probably still be spinning his wheels — and holding on to his best songs — if he'd never met Rubin. From this point of view, Songwriter it's like an alternate universe American Recordings — one that also overlooks Cash as a great performer of other people's songs (see: “Solitary Man,” “Hurt”). Coincidentally for Cash, and the rest of us, the planets aligned in this universe, setting Cash up for one of music's greatest final acts.
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