Johnny Cash has a new album out this week, a remarkable achievement for a man who would be celebrating his 78th birthday on Friday had he not died in 2003.
The album, “Cash: American VI This Ain’t No Grave” is the final installment (or so we’re told) of the collaboration between the legendary performer and acclaimed producer Rick Rubin. The half-dozen discs have been that rarity in music (or, perhaps, in any art form) … they are more dramatic, more intimate and more expressive of human nature than what came earlier in in the artist’s career.
And when you’re talking about someone whose career was as stellar as Johnny Cash, that’s extraordinary to consider.
What makes the American Recordings series work is Cash’s commitment (and Rubin’s restraint) to putting the performer front and center in a way that — in this voice-enhancer era — makes the listener all too aware of an aging man’s frailty. When an artist is willing to show us his soul, it (momentarily, at least) gives us pause to search for our own.
The most-famous of the Cash recordings during this period is his award-winning cover of the Nine Inch Nails song “Hurt.” The cuts I’ve heard on the new disc don’t quite reach that level, although his line readings on Tom Paxton’s “I Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound” are filled with the mood of prescient mortality that marked the strongest of Cash’s final recordings.
Many times, posthumous releases of an artist’s work can seem unwarranted. But that’s not the case here. The final songs of Johnny Cash betray his health and slow our breath but, in their fragile artistry, that just might be the point.
