When Johnny Cash teamed up with Rick Rubin for 1994’s American Recordings, their partnership launched one of the great final acts in 20th-century American music. Yet such a comeback would have seemed vanishingly 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 tacky theaters housing fading stars from yesteryear. The country icon couldn’t even get that right. His financial backing went belly up prior to the launch of the Johnny Cash Theatre in the summer of 1992. When he did finally play the venue a year later, he was stuck filling in for its new headline attraction: the notorious lounge lizard Wayne Newton.
The previously unheard demos on Songwriter, a posthumous new album, shed light on that comeback, a narrative so immutable that it today seems etched in stone. They’re drawn from sessions at Nashville’s LSI Studios, where Cash set up at some point in the early ’90s to record a clutch of newly written 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 partially altruistic, as it was the joint property of his stepdaughter Rosie and her then-husband Mike Daniel, and thus an easy way to funnel some funds their way. It’s also possible that the demos were meant to persuade another label to sign the country veteran—a goal that was met by other means once Cash met Rubin in 1993.
Two of the tunes on Songwriter, “Drive On” and “Like a Soldier,” also appear on American Recordings, and their simultaneous presence illuminates the distance between the two projects. They’re two of the lighter moments on the spare, stoic American Recordings and two of the weightier songs on Songwriter, a record that finds plenty of room for Cash’s humor and sentimentality, character traits Rubin staunchly avoided. The two qualities combine on “I Love You Tonite,” a love letter to June Carter Cash in which he marvels that they’ve made it through the decades and wonders if they’ll last until the new millennium.
Some big concerns nag at Cash—he ponders the fate of the planet on “Hello Out There”—yet he generally spends Songwriter operating at a smaller scale, penning character sketches of single mothers sustained by their love of James Taylor, flirting with a woman at the laundromat (“Well Alright”), and writing an ode to all the pretty girls from Little Rock. There’s no sense of foreboding here; it’s as light and rambling as any of the LPs he cut during his waning days at Columbia in the early 1980s or the unjustly maligned Mercury platters from later that decade.
Songwriter distinguishes itself through its posthumous production. Working with longtime engineer David Ferguson, John Carter Cash labored to break these dated LSI demos away from their origins, stripping down the recordings—and adding new parts from players like Vince Gill and Dan Auerbach—so they feature little more than voice, a little guitar, and, in two cases, harmony vocals from Waylon Jennings. The presence of his fellow Highwayman illustrates that these original LSI recordings were no solitary affair. At least 10 session players are thanked in the liner notes, including Marty Stuart, who was among the many musicians enlisted by Carter Cash and Ferguson to transform the tapes into a record that feels closer to American Recordings than Boom Chicka Boom, to name one of those final Mercury records. Their work is so nuanced and sympathetic to Cash’s idiosyncrasies that Gill’s vocal harmonies on “Poor Valley Girl” and Auerbach’s guitar on the after-hours blues “Spotlight” barely register: The focus remains solely on Cash.
That John Carter Cash and David Ferguson succeed in freeing these tunes from their period trappings, creating a record that’s conceivably a cousin to the sepia-toned traditionalism of American Recordings, is no small feat. It can be difficult to hear Cash’s charms through the bright, digital clang that plagues his ’80s recordings. The refurbished warmth of Songwriter makes it easier to concentrate on the clever turns of phrase and solid construction of these excavated tunes. As pleasurable as they are—and they’re quite endearing, particularly for listeners who enjoy the silly and tender sides of the Man in Black—it’s also clear that if they’d been released as an album in 1993, these songs wouldn’t have altered the course of Cash’s career the way American Recordings did. That album demonstrated a real understanding of Cash’s mythos; Songwriter is mostly a testament to the sturdiness of his craft.
