You can't expect these things. So let me start in another place to
explain.
It was when I saw Rosanne Cash tour with Lucinda Williams and Mary
Chapin Carpenter back in 1990, on the heels of her starkly superb
Interiors. The title said it all. Sadly, Cash was like a creature
crushed between two windstorms of talent and country charisma. Growing up
must have felt the same. As the daughter of Johnny Cash and the
stepdaughter of June Carter Cash, she is as close as it gets to country
music royalty. But anyone who has seen Walk the Line can only imagine
what she witnessed as a girl.
After a decade, Interiors still
dominated a meandering, muted career that lay deep in her family shadow.
Rosanne Cash was talented, yes, but Interiors was basically her
broken soul in momentary tune, a darkly lucky strike. Then Johnny and June
died a few months apart in 2003, just as Rosanne Cash began working on this
record. Her mother, Vivien Cash Distin, the woman he left for June, also
died as Black Cadillac was being completed. What you get from those
events is death and grandeur, the ghostly sweet sound of Johnny's voice
calling her from some old lost piece of tape, the child's-eye view of it
all, the woman who's been around, the heavy begetting of release and
reconciliation. Yet by the time Rosanne Cash is singing "It's a lonely
world, I guess it always was," it sounds like a goddamned triumph, not a sob.
And that's from the first song on. Lyrically Black Cadillac is
exquisite. Musically it's far more than a country record, expanding into
those mighty rooms of roots music and pop-rock where Bob Dylan's Time Out
of Mind and Lucinda Williams' Car Wheels on a Gravel Road shine
and burn against their own dark palettes. Rosanne Cash walks the line just
great.
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