When Johnny Cash teamed up with Rick Rubin for 1994 American Recordings, their collaboration launched one of the great final acts in 20th century American music. However, such a comeback would have seemed unlikely at the dawn of the 90s. Without a major label for the first time since 1958, Cash had resigned himself to the inglorious depths of Branson, Missouri, the Ozark town known for its tacky theaters that housed fading stars of the past. The country icon couldn't even get it right. His financial backing was raised long before the Johnny Cash Theater opened in the summer of 1992. When he finally played the venue a year later, he was stuck filling his new attraction: notorious lounge lizard Wayne Newton.
The previously unheard of demonstrations in Songwriter, a posthumous new album, shed light on that return, a narrative so unchanged that today it seems set in stone. They come from sessions at Nashville's LSI Studios, where Cash set up sometime in the early '90s to record a number 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 partly altruistic, as it was jointly owned by his stepdaughter Rosie and her then-husband Mike Daniel, and thus an easy way to funnel some money their way. It's also possible that the shows were meant to convince another label to sign the country veteran — a goal that was accomplished through other means once Cash met Rubin in 1993.
Two of the songs in Songwriter“Drive On” and “Like a Soldier” also appear. American Recordings, and their simultaneous presence illuminates the distance between the two works. They are two of the lighter moments in the backup, stoically American Recordings and two of the heavier songs Songwriter, a record that finds plenty of room for Cash's humor and sentimentality, character traits that Rubin staunchly avoided. The two qualities combine on “I Love You Tonite,” a love letter to June Carter Cash in which she marvels that they've made it through the decades and wonders if they'll last into the new millennium.
Some big concerns nag at Cash—he ponders the fate of the planet on “Hello Out There”—but he generally spends Songwriter operating on a smaller scale, writing character sketches of single mothers sustained by their love for James Taylor, flirting with a laundromat (“Well, All Right”), and writing an ode to all the pretty girls of Little Rock. There is no sense of foreboding here. it's as light and adventurous as any of the LPs he cut during his Columbia days in the early 1980s or the unfairly maligned Mercury platters from the end of the decade.
