Rosanne

Despite what some have said recently about me (in the Mary Gauthier section of Tower Records) I listen to more than Menopausal Heritage Rock. But playing along, I wanted to put a spotlight on a gem of the genre.
A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to see Rosanne Cash and her band perform at Carnegie Hall. The show was filled with many songs that I had never heard before and a few that I was familiar with (Seven Year Ache primarily) but it was the songs from her new record that most captivated me. So here goes, an introduction of sorts to Black Cadillac.

“It was a black Cadillac that drove you away…” sings Rosanne Cash in the opening moments of Black Cadillac. The line is just one of many pieces of Man In Black imagery peppered throughout Rosanne Cash’s newest album, Black Cadillac. There are only a few upbeat tracks on the record, but that makes sense. The album opens with that great baritone voice calling his daughter forward when she was a young child, from what sounds like a home recording. To us he was Johnny Cash, to her he is Dad and she lost him as well as her mother in a short time span, so it is no real surprise that Black Cadillac is about them and about Rosanne Cash herself, now that they are gone and she remains, though seemingly moving forward.
Radio Operator may be about Rosanne Cash’s parents sending messages to one another or maybe not but the sound has a sprightly hop to it and a little twang in its’ chorus. Like every song on the album it is full of plush production, filled out by various string instruments in which you can hear the picks touching upon the strings.
Even if the songs sucked, Cash has a great voice and can carry a tune. You don’t have to listen to understand the words or to know exactly what she is saying and that’s because she gets her job done. Her pitch doesn’t change often like an Emmylou Harris but that doesn’t matter because she has the same sort of glowing quality to the sounds emitting from her mouth. The World Unseen is an example of Cash’s superb voice. Her vocals continue on until you realize the intensity of the instrumentation and her voice have risen and come together, taking over even the most casual, unsuspecting listener, and bringing them to a place they did not know they were heading.
On I Was Watching You, Cash takes a somber look into her past, quickly moving forward to the present with her displaying an aching tone that finds her singing of and to her departed father. Lead by a simple pleading piano melody Cash declares more to herself than any listener, “I didn’t know it but you were always there, ‘till September when you slipped away in the middle of my life on the longest day, now I hear you say ‘I’ll be watching you from above.’”
One gets the feeling he has been invited to view the photo album of another's family or to read someone else's diary and discovers it is all too interesting yet he shouldn't have the access. What is in his hands is the pain of another, but then realizes Rosanne Cash’s world is no different than his own. She makes heartbreak, despair and unflinching optimism in the face of her significant loss our own. That is the magic of the songwriter to take the unfamiliar and distant and twist it into a feeling and mood we all can relate to.
Now that the singer is gone, Rosanne Cash is still singing his song, and doing a fine job.