Photo: Mercury Nashville
Few characters loom as large over 20th century music as Johnny Cash. After producing a string of iconic hits during the ‘50s through ‘70s, from 'Folsom Prison Blues' and 'Walk the Line', to 'Ring of Fire' and 'Man in Black'.
And then, after a quiet ‘80s, Cash enjoyed a triumphant return in the 1990s, in the form of his American Recordings series, produced by Rick Rubin. Those represented a back-to-basics approach that paid dividends.
But just prior to meeting Rubin, Cash had been preparing demos for a forthcoming project that never saw the light of day, until now. His son John Carter Cash discovered the recordings and prepared them for release, and in their current form, they serve as a fascinating counterpoint to what Cash, then in his 60s, was about to put forth.
‘Hello Out There’ starts the album with a fitting title, and some lyrics alluding to the second coming of Christ, but musically it’s miles away from the stripped-bare sound of American Recordings.
When Cash met Rick Rubin, he was encouraged by the producer to record at home, with just his acoustic. There’s been some pushback online recently about Rubin’s legacy, but decisions like that are how he made his name.
The song ‘Drive On’ appears on American Recordings, and here, and serves as a good example of the difference production can make: on that album it’s raw, sparse and moody. Here, the addition of percussion and layers of guitar render it downright triumphant.
The process of making this album involved John Carter Cash and co-producer taking the multitracks of these songs and stripping away everything except Johnny Cash’s guitar and voice, then re-tracking the instrumentation with a new band.
It’s a sound that harks back to Cash’s heyday, which must have been the intention. The nostalgia is potent, enough that, for the most part, it doesn’t feel too retrograde.
It also reopens the door to the sillier side of Cash, on songs like ‘Well Alright’.
That song, a story about a romantic encounter at a laundromat, is quaint, and charming; even a bit sexy. It’s a very different Cash to the one grappling with mortality on the American albums.
'Soldier Boy' features the lyric, “Doodle, doodle, doo”.
On ‘She Sang Sweet Baby James’, the tone is more wistful and romantic, enhanced by a twinkling mandolin, and swooping strings.
Over the course of the American series, Johnny Cash covered tracks by Soundgarden, Beck, Will Oldham, and his version of ‘Hurt’ by Nine Inch Nails is more well known than the original, to the extent that Trent Reznor, its original composer, said “that song isn’t mine anymore”.
The repurposed demos here are quainter and less forward-thinking, but a chance to hear new songs by the Man in Black is reason enough to enjoy them.
It’s easy to imagine ‘I love you Tonight’ was written with June Carter Cash in mind, in lyrics like “I love you even more than I loved you in the ‘60s”. A particularly touching line goes, “Will we make the millennium? Well we might.”
John and June died in 2003.
