Rosanne Cash
Black Cadillac (Capitol)
by Marc Hirsh
Rosanne Cash
Black Cadillac (Capitol)
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in The Boston Globe, January 24, 2006
The specter of loss underlying Rosanne Cash’s new
album is
hard to ignore, from the title’s invocation of a hearse to elegiac
songs such
as “I Was Watching You” and “The World Unseen.” But Cash is aware that
it’s a
fool’s errand to ignore the context in which Black Cadillac
was made – the past two and a half years have seen the
deaths of her father, mother and stepmother, among others – so she
confronts it
head on. The resulting album is probing where it could have been
maudlin, delicate
where it could have been smothering and quite possibly her best work
since
1990’s Interiors.
Like that album, Black Cadillac is marked by an unflinching directness and an acknowledgement that whatever must be done, she must find the strength to do it herself. A recent Entertainment Weekly article discussed how, despite the public outpouring of emotion after her father’s death and the recent success of Walk The Line, Cash declined to become involved in the film’s promotion and grieved privately for her father John R. rather than Johnny the music icon. Fittingly enough, there are no featured guests or outside material as on 2003’s Rules Of Travel. Black Cadillac is all Cash.
The album opens with a snippet of not the legend but the father urging his little girl to speak, and she finds the words she needs. “One of us gets to go to heaven / One has to stay here in hell,” sings Cash in a hushed murmur over the title track’s roiling bass, and by the end, organ, electric piano, guitar and harmonica have slowly erupted into a subtle cacophony that tries to make sense of it all.
She can’t, but she comes closest in the gently
accepting
“God Is In The Roses,” where the line “Every drop of rain that falls /
Falls
for those who mourn / God is in the roses / And the thorns” arrives
with a perfect
inevitability. Acknowledging her grief but refusing to be overpowered
by it,
Cash tempers slower songs like the soft and tender “Like A Wave” with
the
ice-water organ and Los Lobos-style stutter-rumble of “Burn Down This
Town” and
“World Without Sound,” where a drunken horn section floats over
thudding drums
and an insistent, clunking piano until gospel backing vocals and a
ringing,
Beatlesque guitar flood the chorus.
Holding Black Cadillac together is Cash’s voice, an instrument of almost pure empathy that burrows deep into the heart of what she’s singing. It has much the same effect as her father’s, simply a pleasure to hear and soothing in how it remains practically unchanged more than a quarter century down the line except for an added wisdom and maturity. No matter what happens, Rosanne Cash is still Rosanne Cash.