Composed (20 page)
Authors: Rosanne Cash
At that moment the owner came up to me and said with authority, as he pointed to
Rhythm and Romance,
“No, no, no. This one is not good.” He flipped through a couple more albums and pulled out
King’s Record Shop.
“THIS one. This is a great record.”
I looked at him and smiled. He didn’t make the connection.
Shyly, I said, “It’s me.” He still didn’t understand. I raised the album next to my face.
“C’est moi.
It’s me.”
“Oh my God!” he gasped, and we both laughed. We retired to a nearby café and drank a bottle of red wine together and talked about music.
It’s me. They are all me, the good and the bad.
I want to know what lives behind language; I am both limited and ennobled by words and rhyme. The songs have been an attempt to discover the mysteries. In a more proscribed way, my life is entirely contained in my songs, even the ones I wrote in other voices and characters (“Last Stop Before Home,” “The Good Intent”), and even the ones I wrote to try (unsuccessfully) to get some big country artist to record so I could get myself out of debt (“Closer Than I Appear”).
Sometimes songs are indeed postcards from the future, and are not written out of prescience as much as time travel. Thornton Wilder said, “It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.” In songwriting, I have found my attention to wander both forward and backward on that continuum. But with or without prescience, considering only the hard-earned craftsmanship of songwriting, as I get older I have found the quality of my attention to be more important, and more rewarding, than the initial inspiration. This maturation in songwriting has proven surprisingly satisfying. Thirty years ago I would have said that the bursts of inspiration, and the ecstatic flood of feeling that came with them, were an emotionally superior experience, preferable to the watchmaker’s concentration required for the detail work of refining, editing, and polishing. But the reverse is proving to be true. Like everything else, given enough time and the long perspective, the opposite of those things that we think define us slowly becomes equally valid and sometimes more potent. I have learned to be steady in my course of love, or fear, or loneliness, rather than impulsive in its wasting, either lyrically or emotionally. The discipline I began to refine after I dreamed of Art during
King’s Record Shop
has paid off immeasurably, and provided context for my entire life.
Paradoxically, I discovered an unexpected sense of mastery and of musical shelter through releasing my first album of covers,
The List
, in 2009. The list of songs my dad had given me on a tour bus rolling through the South in 1973, right after I graduated from high school, when he was afraid I lacked half the essential knowledge I needed to become a roots musician (he knew I knew my Lennon and McCartney and my Neil Young, but not Woody Guthrie or Jimmie Rodgers), became the source material for an understanding of the fullness of my own legacy. John and I carefully chose an album’s worth of songs from that list and we brought everything we knew, both together and separately, about this music, from decades of love and study, to
The List
. I had saved the list Dad made me in a box of letters for all these years, never thinking I would record any of those songs—I was a songwriter, separately and defiantly—but after losing my parents, and after the brain surgery, some ideas that had been on the periphery of my dreams began to take sharp and urgent focus, and making a record of these songs that were so clearly part of Dad’s musical genealogy, and therefore my own, became a primary goal. It was a 180-degree turn; the idea of stepping into a body of work outlined for me by Dad had always been far too complicated for me to consider. I had done an exhausting dance with his legacy for my entire life. Again, it was John who encouraged me. “It’s time to step into this,” he said. “It’s your legacy, too.” Again, he was right. It dawned on me during the recording that it was a record I wanted to make for my children as much as for myself or the honor of my ancestors. Traditions can take root out of the dormant impulses of one’s own soul, if they are powerful enough, whether we acknowledge them or not. I finally had the wisdom and the grace not only to acknowledge but to revere them and embody them with real joy.
The List
represents a kind of resolution, of so many seemingly disparate but intimately related themes and struggles in my life, both musical and personal. I had so much fear of exploiting my father, and not doing things on my own, but it was more than that. He cast an obviously large shadow, and it was hard for me to find my own place outside of it, or to be comfortable when the shadow was the first thing people noticed about my life or my work. Dad himself understood my struggle and gave me a lot of room, and a lot of purely parental approval. But the times I did approach the legacy that the list represented, his excitement was unbounded. When “Tennessee Flat-Top Box” became a number one record for me, he was delirious with happiness. In the last few months of his life, I enthusiastically sang all the old Carter Family songs to him when he rested in the afternoons, and I could see it was a tremendous solace, not only because of the songs themselves, but because he saw that I was beginning to say yes. I wish he had been alive to hear
The List
, and to see me say yes to all of it, and more than that, to revel in it as if it were a secret passed from parent to child, and a key to a particular familial mystery. Now it’s Chelsea’s turn, and John and I wouldn’t be surprised if Jake followed as well, as the next generation of musicians and songwriters in our family to do their own dance with their parents and grandparents, and to listen for the secrets.
In the fullness of that legacy, I am still first and foremost a songwriter. The curatorial work and the deliberate attention on my voice rather than my words, which happened with
The List
, has only added to my sense of honor as a songwriter and respect for the art and discipline.
I have a fear that I have a personal quota, bestowed at birth, of first-rate songs allotted to me, and I worry, after every new song I write, that I have finally reached that magic number. So, inevitably, mixed with the satisfaction of accomplishment is anxiety and sadness that this might be the end. The uncertainty is vexing, but it keeps me humble. I am always a beginner, again and again. I work, even when I worry.
I sing to the six percent, and they are me. I am not a pane of glass. There is light and it is always available. Much of it comes through music; at least half. And it turns out that a lonely road is a bodyguard.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would not have written this book without the encouragement and faith of my editor, Rick Kot. Thank you, Rick, for asking me to do this more than a decade ago. Many thanks also to Laura Tisdel, assistant to Rick Kot, and a wonderful and deeply organized woman, and to my fabulous and long-suffering agent, Merrilee Heifetz, at Writers House. Grateful acknowledgment, always, to the teams of dedicated people at Viking and Manhattan Records, and thank you also to Christian Oth and to Anita Merk.
Thank you to Danny Kahn, my manager, who has envisioned great things for me when I lacked imagination to see them for myself, and who has taken nearly every step I’ve taken since then with unfailing cheer.
I owe special thanks to my family, for allowing me to depict them from my own myopic perspective. It is incredibly generous, and I am very grateful to John, Kathy, Cindy, Tara, John Carter, Hannah, Caitlin, Chelsea, Carrie, and Jake, as well as Sylvia, Dick, and Rodney.
Gratitude goes to my friends who keep coming to see me perform, who come for tea, and who make great allowances for my schedule in our friendships, and especially the writers who offered me extra encouragement and support: Adriana Trigiani and Joe Henry for their inspiration and cheerleading, Kurt Andersen and Anne Kreamer for very particular advice, Wesley Stace and Bill Flanagan for the general love, and a special bow to George Kalogerakis, who keeps asking me to write things for him. Some of those things ended up in this book.
Tim McHenry, the director of programming at the Rubin Museum of Art, in Manhattan, has given me the great gift of allowing me to write and perform ten shows for the museum. It has offered me a unique forum to expand on a lot of musical ideas. Thank you, Tim.
I owe a tremendous debt to the superb musicians I have worked with over the years. I have learned so much from them. I have become not just a better musician, but a better person by being in the presence of those who use the available light of music as currency in the world. Many thanks to my vocal coaches, Marge Rivingston and William Riley.
I owe peripheral, but essential, thanks to the team of doctors who have taken care of me in the last few years, and who have brought me back to health: Dr. Norman Latov, Dr. Guy McKhann II, Dr. Eric Heyer, Dr. Lila Nachtigall, Dr. Barry Cohen, and Dr. Michael Weinberger. Thanks also to Dr. Jim Davis, who gave advice and referrals, and to Nolan Baer, Shellie Goldstein, and Evan Johnson for extraneous body and soul maintenance.
I wish I could thank my mother and father, for so many things I didn’t have enough awareness or detachment to appreciate: thousands of acts of service and love, tolerance and support. I think of them every day.
Most especially, I thank John. He always pushes me to tell more, write it down, own it, share it. I’m so grateful that he does.
More to come.
FRONTISPIECE CAPTIONS
Row 1: Johnny and Vivian Cash; Rosanne, age seven
Row 2: Johnny with Rosanne (top left), Cindy, and Kathy, circa 1959; Vivian holding Tara, with Kathy (right), Cindy (middle), and Rosanne (left), circa 1962
Row 3: John Leventhal at home, 2009; Johnny Cash walks his daughter down the aisle, 1995; Rosanne in performance under a full moon, Germany, 2008
Row 4: John and Rosanne, Guana Island, 2008; Rosanne’s five children at Caitlin’s wedding, from left to right: Chelsea, Jake, Caitlin, Carrie, and Hannah