Rosanne Cash
Black Cadillac (Capitol)
Your PC music library will file Rosanne Cash's new album under 'folk'. That's like describing her father as a pop diva. Black Cadillac is 12 tracks of hard blues, rock, brass and agnostic gospel.
Cash lost her father, mother and stepmother within two years. The rest of us pruned their lives into the movie Walk the Line. But the oldest daughter of Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto, put together an album about having to remake her life, like a fugitive: 'It's a strange new world we live in/ where the church leads you to hell/ and the lawyers get the money/ for the lives they divide and sell/ and the only truth believed in/ is the one up on the screen'.
The album opens with the voice of her father talking to Cash in the 1950s and rolls into the pulsing bass of the title track, the foundation of the album. Written six weeks before the death of June Carter-Cash, it borrows the Mexican horns of Ring of Fire, a song she wrote for her husband. Cash immediately affirms that this is more than 'Why me?' grief. She mourns without resenting that her loved ones had to pass: 'It's a black heart of pain that I'm wearing/ that suits me fine/ 'cause there was nothing I could do for you/ when you were still alive'.
Written with and produced by her husband, John Leventhal, the CD comes with a video and pictures of the lakeside home where Johnny Cash rebuilt his life with Carter. By tightening the songs around great playing and frank lyrics, Cash spells out her fear that 'the big house is haunted with what we don't feel'.
