Like most people in their 20s, Rosanne Cash in 1976 was casting about for what to do with the rest of her life. She didn’t want to go into the family business, which was country music. Her father was Johnny Cash; her stepmother was June Carter, and her stepgrandmother was Maybelle Carter of the Carter Family, but Rosanne didn’t want to spend her life on the kind of tour bus that had so often taken her father away from his family. She wanted to be something very different: a literary author.
At the end of that summer, she returned from an internship with CBS Records in London and enrolled at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University. She wrote a lot of poetry and short stories, as she had in her California high school, but she couldn’t seem to get the hang of it. So after a year of college she moved to L.A. to study acting at the Lee Strasburg Theatre Institute. That didn’t take either, and she realized that maybe the family business and literature weren’t so incompatible after all. Maybe writing country songs required the same craftsmanship and provided the same psychological rewards as writing poems and novels. In the fall of 1977, she traveled to Germany to make her rarely heard first album, which was co-produced by a young Texan named Rodney Crowell.
“When I started writing songs, there was a clarity,” she told me in 2003, “because all the fat fell away. I said, ‘This is what I’m going to be able to do.’ The songs impose such a structure, and I had always felt so passionate about music; it was the thing that made me feel most alive. When I learned to play the guitar, I had a way to combine my writing and my love of music. It wasn’t calculated, but once it presented itself, I knew that was it.”
Forty-one years after Vanderbilt, she has become the writer she always wanted to be. Though she has published four books of prose and has contributed to the New York Times and the Oxford American, her primary vehicle is still songwriting, the latest fruits of which are collected on her new album, She Remembers Everything. She has gained enough respect as a wordsmith that T Bone Burnett asked her to write some lyrics — just words, no music — for the second season of True Detective in 2015.
“I loved that he just wanted lyrics,” Cash says over breakfast at Nashville’s Westin Hotel. “I like it when someone gives me a topic. T Bone wanted a narcocorrido where a girl turns into a bird and another song about separation and longing. I like the pressure of serious deadlines, because I can get lazy unless I’m forced to work. I like being given a world and entering it.”
Burnett and singer Lera Lynn didn’t change one of Cash’s words when they added music to the two lyrics: the Carlos Castaneda-colored corrido “My Least Favorite Life” and the separation ballad “The Only Thing Worth Fighting For.” Lynn recorded the two songs for the TV show, but Cash has reclaimed them as the closer and opener, respectively, for her new album. Neither is a linear narrative; rather, each is an assemblage of images and metaphors that fit together puzzle-like to conjure up a situation.
“When you think of Bruce’s ‘Highway Patrolman’ or ‘When The Master Calls The Roll,” Cash says of the Springsteen song and the song she co-wrote with her ex-husband Crowell and her current husband John Leventhal, “those are linear songs; they have a narrative. But most of my songs aren’t. Even when I wrote my prose memoir, it wasn’t linear; it kept looping back on itself. As Faulkner said, the past is always present. A lot of my songs are about the past and present colliding.”
“The Only Thing Worth Fighting For,” for example, depicts an estranged couple revisiting the old house as if it were the scene of the crime. “The empty rooms of dusty books and quiet dreams,” the narrator sings over rock-noir guitar and throbbing bass; “pictures on the mantle speak your name softly like forgotten tunes just outside the sound of pain.” This Patricia Highsmith-flavored ballad finds the two older, no-longer-together lovers recalling their younger selves who were able to snatch some love from all their problems. “Weren’t we like a pair of thieves,” the narrator asks, “with tumbled locks and broken codes? You cannot take that from me: my small reprieves, your heart of gold.”
This metaphor about aging robbers resurfaces in the album’s title track, co-written and co-sung by Sam Phillips (Burnett’s ex-wife). “There was a time we looked so fine,” the narrator sings, “behind a burning wall of larceny and tenderness … Somewhere there’s a quiet room, where thieves like us can rest.”
“These are thieves who steal happiness from an unforgiving world,” Cash explains. “I’ve had my problems, of course, but I have so many gifts I probably don’t deserve. I was talking to Ethan Hawke recently about reconciling privilege. So many people are more gifted than us, and yet they live lives that are so much harder.”
The power of Cash’s images can be measured in another way. This fall the University of Texas Press has published a book, Bird On A Blade, which pairs excerpts from her lyrics with illustrations by veteran artist Dan Rizzie. Many of the extracts come from the new album, including the couplet, “A kiss holds a million deceits/ And a lifetime goes up in smoke,” from “My Least Favorite Life.” On the facing page, Rizzie presents the silhouette of a blackbird surrounded by cosmic spheres against the backdrop of a faded birth certificate. The line about “a quiet room where thieves like us can rest” is illustrated by a flock of birds hiding within a flowering bush.
“There’s a craft to songwriting, sure,” she says, “but if it’s only craft, that’s hollow to me. It can have a tight rhyme and can tell a story, but if it doesn’t touch that mystery, it’s not that interesting to me. I’ve learned to take more risks with putting opposing ideas together that shouldn’t be together. More ambiguity is something I’ve come to be comfortable with. Don’t explain too much.”
These songs all wrestle with the primary subject of Cash’s entire career: the relations between men and women in romantic relationships during an era when the two sides are approaching equality but haven’t arrived there yet. Unwilling to accept a life of male domination nor a life without male love, she insists on engaging the men in her life in negotiation over the terms of their give and take. “Weren’t we like a battlefield?” she sings, “locked inside a holy war; your love and my due diligence, the only thing worth fighting for.”
This time, however, those decades of negotiation are shadowed by the knowledge that there are fewer years ahead than behind. Cash, now 63, addresses this directly in “Not Many Miles To Go.” Sung to her husband Leventhal, 66 this month, it’s a catalogue of all the things she’s grateful for over the course of a long marriage: the diamond ring, the baby boy, the Manhattan skyline, the small-batch bourbon and his Telecaster. Paraphrasing Robert Frost, she concludes over a country-rock lope, “Time keeps slipping through the curtain; from this point on there’s nothing certain, except there’s not many miles to go and just one promise left to keep.”
Mortality itself looms large in “Crossing To Jerusalem,” a song where the ancient city is a stand-in for whatever lies after death, if, in fact, anything does. Constructed as a slow Appalachian hymn led by an acoustic guitar, the song compares death as “the great migration” from one realm to another. “Who we are is who we were and all of you were there,” she sings. “We’re crossing to Jerusalem; it’s nothing we can’t bear.”
“That’s about me and John,” she says. “You spend a life together and then you leave it behind with nothing to bring with you but love.”
And yet, after all that negotiation and exploration over the years, there’s still an irreducible mystery about romantic relationships, something that keeps us interested. Yes, she says, keep negotiating and exploring, but don’t forget to “raise a glass, be thankful for what we don’t understand: the undiscovered country between a woman and a man.” That song’s title, “The Undiscovered Country,” comes from Hamlet, but where Shakespeare was referring to death, Cash is referring to the terra incognita between lovers that keeps us questing.
“I keep a list on my phone,” she says, “that I call ‘Stealing from Shakespeare.’ I jot down lines that really strike me. I had jotted down ‘jewel in the shade’ from one of the sonnets, for example, and later it occurred to me that I could put it in ‘World Of Strange Design’ on The River & The Thread. Having Shakespeare and Mississippi collide, that gave me a lot of pleasure.’”
Three of the best songs about a long marriage, “Undiscovered Country,” “Crossing To Jerusalem” and “Everyone But Me,” a Randy Newman-ish ballad about that strange limbo when you have adult children and no living parents, were all co-written by Cash and Leventhal. They had co-written all 11 tracks on the previous album, The River & The Thread, but just three this time; they wanted to open the windows more.
“Writing songs together and apart are a part of the fabric of our marriage,” says Leventhal, “so it’s something we’re always doing, but it shifts into higher gear when a project is coming up. For The River & The Thread I was driving the engine more; on this one she was driving the engine more. We’ve done some songs where I give Rosanne some music to write lyrics to, but I think we’ve done our best work when I’ve set her lyrics to music. It forces me out of my box and forces me to pay attention to what the lyrics are saying, which helps with the music.”
“When John and I write, I usually hand him a lyric first” she adds, then laughs. “Then he’ll beat me up over the number of syllables in the lyrics or he’ll recoil at a certain word, like ‘wince’ in ‘The Master Calls The Roll.’ Sometimes I give in; sometimes I hold out. Some of the most intense arguments of our marriage have been about songwriting. But when it’s fight number 75, you know it’s not going to be fatal.”
“I think the tunes we’ve been writing the past 10 years,” he continues, “are better than the ones we wrote before that — back when it more often started with my music. I think her lyrical powers have grown, so when she hands me a great lyric, it makes me want to write some great music to go with it. She’s not giving me poems; she’s giving me song lyrics, though her language can certainly be poetic. She has a developed sense of meter, and I have a deep awareness in my DNA from listening to hundreds of great songs of how rhythm works.”
The sound of the new album loops back to the chamber-pop atmosphere of 1993’s The Wheel, her farewell to country radio after its rejection of her 1990 masterpiece Interiors and also her first album produced by Leventhal. Ironically, She Remembers Everything is her first album since Interiors not fully produced by her current husband. He handled half the tracks, including his three co-writes plus a collaboration with Elvis Costello and Kris Kristofferson. Tucker Martine produced the other half, including the co-writes with Burnett, Lynn and Phillips. Oregon’s Martine, who has produced My Morning Jacket, Modest Mouse and his wife Laura Veirs, had long admired Cash but didn’t really know her.
“So often, it seems like a person peaks early in her career,” says Martine, “but she kept getting better and better. And when I finally met her, I understood why. She has this insatiable curiosity about experiences and collaborations that might take her further. I immediately felt a complete trust, that she was going to let the collaboration go where it was going to go. She would certainly speak up when she disagreed with something, but that didn’t happen too often, thankfully. She’d had some hits but she also had these artistic recordings that didn’t seem to be chasing the sound of the moment.”
“It’s not that I didn’t want to work with John,” Cash says carefully. “I love the way we work together and the songs we write, but I also knew I had to break out of the routine. I needed to find my melodic voice again. John said, ‘You should do the whole record with someone else,’ and I said, ‘No, I won’t. You do part of it.’ I can’t overstate how supportive John was of the whole venture.”
It was just another example of negotiation. Burnett and Joe Henry were considered as producers, but their schedules didn’t permit it. Cash and Leventhal had loved the Decemberists’ The King Is Dead and k.d. lang, Neko Case & Laura Veirs’ case/lang/veirs, both albums produced by Martine. He brought back the band he’d used on the latter album and added Cash’s drummer Dan Rieser; Cash suggested they bring in Colin Meloy, the Decemberists’ lead vocalist, to sing on “The Only Thing Worth Fighting For.” That worked so well Cash and Martine used Meloy on “Rabbit Hole” as well.
“I adore Colin’s songwriting,” Cash says. “It’s Shakespearean but none of those literary qualities take away from the feeling. That’s a hard trick to pull off.”
“I grew up listening to my parents’ records,” Meloy recalls, “and Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt were on repeat a lot. Then I found my own music — punk-rock like the Jesus and Mary Chain. Later I found music that was pulling from the country side but still had that DIY and punk ethos. Yo La Tengo’s Fake Book was an eye opener. I realized, ‘Oh, you can do country and still be interesting. That led me to Uncle Tupelo and Rosanne. I think she’s too smart for mainstream country, though she could have maintained a lucrative career there. Her lineage is a big burden to carry, but she still managed to carve out her own identity.”
While all the work on She Remembers Everything was going on, Cash and Leventhal were also neck-deep in another project: writing the songs for a Broadway musical based on the 1979 Sally Field movie Norma Rae, which itself was based on a true story about a labor organizer in a North Carolina textile mill. The couple was invited by producer Gregory Mosher (Lincoln Center Theater) to write the songs to accompany the book being written by Tony Award-winner John Weidman (best known for his revision of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes and three collaborations with Stephen Sondheim). If anything was going to make Cash feel like a literary author, it was this.
“Neither Rosanne nor I had done any theatrical writing,” Leventhal says, “so it’s been a different journey. It’s very, very different than writing for a recording artist. It’s less about writing a song and more about telling a story. It’s as if you’re writing part of the book and then setting it to music. The thing we learned is that if the song is not part and parcel with everything else going on, if it’s not helping the story move forward, it doesn’t belong there. It’s not always about writing the best song; in fact, if the song is so good that it demands attention and stops the story, that can work against it.”
“It was so challenging,” adds Cash; “it was unlike anything we’d ever done. To write for a specific character’s voice, to find their voices without being condescending was the hardest songwriting job I’ve ever had. To get inside their heads was kind of like acting, and that was satisfying. I did it by finding the language I would use to express what she was feeling and then I’d translate it into her language, which isn’t mine. John was phenomenal. He had a sense of how to combine roots music and Broadway orchestrations and remain true to both.”
“We’ve completed a version of the score,” Leventhal continues, “and we’ve had a reading. We’re in the third year of the process and only a little more than halfway done. Now we’re in the editing and rewriting phase. The songs aren’t set till opening night — and sometimes not even then. We did do a show with our excellent band at Lincoln Center earlier this year to see if the songs have a life outside the musical, and they went over well, so we think they do.”
The night before our breakfast conversation, Cash had been on stage during the Americana Music Association’s annual award show at the Ryman Auditorium to accept the “Spirit of Americana Free Speech in Music Award,” an award first given to her father back in 2002. Wearing a black suit with songbirds appliqued to the jacket, she justified the award with a stirring speech that advocated fair compensation for musicians, equal pay for women and gun control to protect schoolchildren. It was the kind of carefully crafted oratory that revealed another side of the writer she has become.
“I’m not that brave,” she concluded, “and I’m way down the ladder of those who work so much harder on these and other equally important issues — who don’t get this kind of attention but live quiet, heroic lives of active compassion. I just have a surplus of righteous indignation and I’m too old to care about the predictable insults. This award will give me courage to speak up more. As Tom Morello said, ‘I didn’t put down my first amendment rights when I picked up my guitar.’ And I learned that at the knee of the first person to receive this award.”