With a new album, a new book, a new husband, and a new outlook on life,singer Roseanne Cash has truly escaped the shadow of her legendary father.
She's every bit as unconventional as you'd expect Johnny Cash's daughter to be. Instead of riding the coattails of the country music boom, Roseanne Cash, 41, has developed her own unique style--a smart blend of folk, pop, and country on which she hangs intimate, probing lyrics. Her latest release, 10 Song Demo, wasn't even supposed to be an album--the recordings were meant as test runs, to be redone later. But her record company liked the demos so much it put them out as is. Cash also paints--her work graces several album covers--and recently authored a collection of stories, Bodies of Water.
PT: Your last few records aren't what most people think of when they think of country music. How would you describe what you're doing?
RC: Postmodern pagan folk music (laughs). I don't know. It's folk-based, and by folk I mean everything from traditional Appalachian music to Tracy Chapman.
PT: How have the fans who gave you four number one country hits in the eighties reacted to your pagan folk music?
RC: They left. I lost a huge part of my audience when I put out Interiors [1990]. But some stayed connected.
PT: Were you worried that might happen?
RC: It's not what I was thinking about. I was so happy to be doing the work I was doing, it felt so satisfying and rich, that I did not give a second thought to how it would be received. Once I finished it, the record company threw up its hands and said, "Country radio is not going to play this." I was hurt.
PT: When you made 10 Song Demo, you didn't expect that anyone would ever hear those recordings. Does that give the album a certain something that maybe it wouldn't have if you'd been consciously "performing" the songs?
RC: There's a certain purity about it. It's as close as I've gotten to the actual writing of the songs being what a listener hears. For instance, with "Take My Body," that was the first time I'd sung it after writing it. So John [Levanthal, Cash's producer and husband of 16 months] tried to convince me to redo the vocal, do it better. I said no, there's something about it being the first time I sang it.
PT: You've said "Bells and Roses"--about a woman on the brink of leaving a lover--is your favorite song on the album.
RC: It's one of those songs I got as a gift from whatever sources give you these gifts. I feel like I just had on my catcher's mitt that day I don't remember writing the song--I got to be the channel for it. I also love how ambiguous the lyrics are. You don't really know what, if anything, is resolved. It's about that moment and the conflicts going on inside her.
PT: This album seems more thematically diverse than Interiors or The Wheel [1993]. But one subject, the human body, pops up in five different songs. Why is that on your mind?
RC: For a lot of reasons. I'm relating to my body in a new way as I get older. I'm enjoying being released from the really confining, rigorous standards young women are held to. So I'm experiencing my body as something completely different. And I just take more delight in being in my body than I used to.
PT: Your lyrics are so personal that reviewers often compare your records to therapy sessions.
RC: Yeah. I don't like that. It really diminishes the work put into it. I mean, when Jackson Pollock was painting, did he go through a therapy session to do it or did he just get to the source of what he was painting? I don't like it being compared to therapy.
PT: 10 Song Demo feels less like an emotional bloodletting.
RC: It's very personal and yet there's more detachment. I've gotten less interested in examining my own belly button.
PT: Do you ever write songs as part of a healing process?
RC: Art and music are very healing to me. I think they're two of the most powerful healing forces m the universe. I mean, have you ever gone to a museum and stood in front of a Vermeer and just had tears roll down your cheeks? That doesn't happen when people stand in front of First National Bank.
PT: It's interesting that many songwriters who specialize in dour songs are quite jovial in real life. How are you different from your songs?
RC: I'm happy. I'm cheerful. I've found in the last couple of years that cheerfulness goes a long way I used to be more morose, melancholy Turning 40 changed a lot of things for me.
PT: It was a positive experience?
RC: Oh my God. So positive. The year leading up to it was difficult, because I was kind of sorting through my baggage--what do I not want to take into the second half of my life?
PT: You've made eight albums now. When you were starting out, did you feel the burden of having a legendary father?
RC: I did, but I had such an attitude when I was starting out that I didn't know what I was feeling. I was just tough. Purple hair, lived in Los Angeles.
PT: You were 11 when your parents divorced. You went to live with your mother, but after high school you toured with your dad for two years. Was that your idea?
RC: It was his. He asked me to come on the road and sing backup, and I wanted to travel.
PT: What did you get out of being on the road with him?
