I interrupt her to ask her more about that bridge. So then it became a big hit and I still hadn’t met him and he came to Nashville and.” So asking him to add a bridge seemed a bit forward. He was well known as a songwriter, he had written ‘Daydream Believer’”-everybody’s guilty pleasure Monkees song-“and he wrote ‘Gold,’ that duet with Stevie Nicks. So we asked him if he would write the bridge. “He wrote this song I recorded, ‘Runaway Train,’” she tells me now. In her memoir, she mentioned a songwriting mentor named John Stewart. I wanted to talk to her about songwriting. Which is appropriate since Rosanne is not just a songwriter but an accomplished writer of prose, author of a much praised short story collection and a memoir, Composed, a beautifully restrained, gracefully written document. Vincent Millay, Mary McCarthy, Djuna Barnes. It’s set among rows of elegantly genteel brownstones whose original gaslight lampposts still flicker at night. The café she chose for lunch, in the West Village, is the very epicenter of New York’s literary haute Bohemia. I cannot be who I was then, in a way, I never was. I cannot move a mountain now, I can no longer run I plan to crawl outside these walls, close my eyes and seeĪnd fall into the heart and arms of those who wait for me There is something both enigmatic and transcendent in the verse she wrote for her father in that duet that demonstrates a master of the fusion of music and emotion: Or til September, her metaphor for death. Once you hear it, you will never recover as long as you live. Warning: See a cardiologist before you listen. The culmination of her reconciliation with her father’s shadow, the most beautiful expression of their enduring love, is the haunting and unbearably sad duet she recorded with him shortly before his death, a song she wrote called “September When It Comes” (on her Rules of Travel album). “It’s now in a file cabinet on my third floor.” She says she plans to make another album from it sometime soon. There have been reports the list itself was thought to be long lost.
The album she made in 2009 called The List contains 12 of the songs. She put it away somewhere, but didn’t forget it. Back when Rosanne was a SoCal Beatles and Byrds teenybopper, and a little embarrassed by country music’s retro image, her father painstakingly wrote out in pencil a list of 100 great country songs she ought to know.
The more she came into her own, the more comfortable she seemed living with her father’s legacy. Her memoir tells of her struggle to escape from her father’s shadow, cutting her first album in Munich, reluctantly accepting his help when she returned to Nashville, where she married a brilliant singer-songwriter (Rodney Crowell, author of what I think is one of the greatest country songs ever, “Til I Gain Control Again”).īy the time they divorced, in 1992, she had moved to New York with her daughters and it was there she found herself personally and musically-self-discovery perhaps best expressed in her dreamy song “Seventh Avenue.” She grew up in Southern California, was a Beatlemaniac rock ’n’ roll chick in her youth, lived in Europe and has been a New Yorker for 20 years. She only lived in Nashville for nine years, she pointed out when we met for lunch near her apartment in the heart of New York City’s Greenwich Village. But first, let’s get this identity thing straightened out.
I’ll get to the connection between love and theoretical physics (seriously) a little later, when I come to our conversation about multiverse theory. She’s American music’s theoretical physicist of love. They create worlds lit by what Cash described to me as “the ebullience that comes from darkness.” She’s not a country and western singer in the tradition of her famous father. Her songs are intense they stay with you like a lifelong fever. You haven’t sighed tragically over her doomy, painfully romantic “Sleeping in Paris” or had your emotional life caught up on “The Wheel” or found yourself alone in a darkened room with an attractive stranger listening to her breathtaking, heart-racing “Runaway Train.” You have missed one of the most gifted singer-songwriters of our time. If you know Rosanne Cash only as Johnny Cash’s daughter, then you haven’t had your heart shattered, your life changed, your spirits lifted-then dashed into the dust-by one of her dangerously beautiful songs.
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