Rosanne Cash has been in the news lately for Composed, her wonderful new memoir. Next year, she hopes it will be for the new music she's going to make in the fall.
Fans of the Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter will enjoy Composed, a collection of connected essays about friends, family and lovers, and formative events both positive and tragic.
During a recent interview, Cash spoke about her music career -- and the fact that she'll be recording with artist/producer Joe Henry and Billy "Mr. Love and Justice" Bragg starting in November. According to Henry, all three of them are writing songs for this collaboration, both for themselves and for one another.
Cash's most recent album was The List, a collection of classic folk, bluegrass and roots songs taken from a list of essential country tunes given her by her father, Johnny Cash, in 1973. (From The List, her duet with Bruce Springsteen on Sea Of Love earned Cash her ninth Grammy nomination.)
"I'm going to do my own songs next, and Part Two of The List at some point," the 55-year-old said. "I didn't think it would be right to go straight into Part Two -- it seemed almost opportunistic. And I felt weird about not reclaiming my stake as a songwriter after The List."
Still, she knows how important it is to keep the songs on her father's essential list alive.
"In a way I feel a responsibility about that, because it's the great American songbook, and it would be a disaster if those songs were just in a museum, if they weren't kept alive," she said.
Cash is also going to release a CD of some of her past material.
"Some of my songs are old -- 20 or 30 years old, and the production is dated. I want to revisit them with a fresh eye. Like, 10 Song Demo," she says of her 1996 recording. "They really were just demos, and deserve to be fleshed out. It's like I'm doing a cover record of myself."
According to Cash, the difference between writing songs and writing her memoir is the little matter of feeling exposed.
"With songs, there's always poetic licence...
"With a memoir, I felt the responsibility to be truthful, to talk about facts and reality, in a poetic way still, but I didn't want to exaggerate or embellish ... Even though there's no dishing or score settling, it feels bare."
Cash's Composed is never sentimental or maudlin, even when she is describing the two-year period in which she lost her father, stepmother, stepsister and aunt. Her mother's death came two years later, on her own 50th birthday, and after that there was 9/11 to get through in New York and a serious brain surgery from which to recover. Typically, Cash said, "I feel very fortunate. I've had an interesting and unusual life, and I don't have regrets about it."
Cash is the oldest of Johnny Cash's four daughters with his first wife, Vivian Liberto. While growing up, Cash spent summers with her father and his second wife, June Carter Cash, and when she finished high school her father took her out on the road with him when he toured. She was in her 20s and married to Rodney Crowell when her own second album, Seven Year Ache, made her a recording star in her own right.
Cash and Crowell raised four daughters together. They were divorced in the early '90s. Cash, who has lived in New York for almost 20 years, is currently married to John Leventhal, with whom she has an adolescent son.
"One reason I moved to New York was so I could be relatively anonymous. I like anonymity," she said, and laughed. "Most writers do.
