Rosanne Cash has been a critical favorite for years, crafting literate country-flavored rock along the lines of Lyle Lovett and Lucinda Williams. Her latest, Black Cadillac, is both a eulogy and a moving ode to things lost. It's universal in scope yet very personal in feeling.
In the space of just a few years between 2003 and 2005, Rosanne lost three parents — her father, singing legend Johnny Cash, her stepmother, June Carter Cash, and her mother, Vivian Liberto Cash, Johnny Cash's first wife.
Rosanne Cash calls Black Cadillac more than just a tribute to Johnny Cash. "(That) diminishes it, and it reduces it to a single dimension," she told Entertainment Weekly recently. Sure, she's paying her respects to Cash's musical legacy, but part of Rosanne Cash's own appeal has always been her dogged insistence on going her own way. She carved out her career separate from her father's years ago.
But how do you deal with private grief in the public eye? You pick up your notebook and guitar and sing about it.
Black Cadillac is a searching quest, for meaning and the small epiphanies that follow death. What happens next? Does love die when the loved one does? Cash's quest here is deeply personal, full of tiny observed details that flesh out her songs and make them true stories, rather than just treacly bombast. Black Cadillac doesn't offer firm answers about life and death — how could it? — but it offers melodic food for thought.
These are beautiful, heartfelt songs about loss that will only fail to move the stone-hearted. "I Was Watching You," as Cash pictures her young parents meeting for the first time, has the sweet tang of ever-optimistic first love. "The World Unseen" nicks a line from the hymn "We Three Kings" to craft an affirming ballad about the search for faith, while "God Is In The Roses," with its chorus — "God is in the roses / and the thorns" — aptly captures the bittersweet, wise feeling of Black Cadillac.
Despite the serious tone, the music, with mellow hints of folk, twang and juke joint-stomp, isn't dour — Cash rocks in the anthemic "Like Fugitives," and the bouncy "World Without Sound" turns from a witty lark into a haunting ballad and back again at the drop of a hat. The title tune even includes a trumpet deep in the mix that evokes Cash's father's classic "Ring of Fire."
It's sometimes a melancholy tonic, but it goes down warmly, unforced, without manufactured sentiment. Rosanne Cash is simply telling us stories, about how she feels and the things she's seen. With Black Cadillac, she's made a rich, layered CD that honors the memory of her family yet continues down her own unique path.
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