Composed (9 page)

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Authors: Rosanne Cash

After a year or so, I received a letter from Columbia’s lawyers informing me that I owed the label a record, and since I clearly was not in preproduction, I was in violation of my contract and they were suspending me. My contract would be extended by the amount of time I was in arrears. I got three or four more letters like this, but each time I crumpled them up and threw them away. Winning a Grammy had not done anything to change my mind about recording again. I toured a bit after
Rhythm and Romance
, but not seriously; my heart wasn’t in any of it, even though I had the privilege of working with some of the most gifted musicians on the planet. Larrie Londin, one of the greatest drummers who ever lived, went on the road with me, and with Rodney as well, out of pure love for the music. Larrie was so much in demand as a session musician that he lost money by touring with us, but he did it anyway. He was such a dear soul. He was physically enormous, and he and I used to tease each other mercilessly. I told him fat jokes and called him names, and he told me my ass was just like Diana Ross’s. (He should have known. He played behind both of us.) We adored each other. When we went out on the tour bus, I gave him the back bedroom, as he literally could not fit in one of the bunks. It was the least I could do. But even though I had wonderful opportunities to play live with people like Larrie for decent money, I didn’t want to go out. I was enjoying summer afternoons at the house in Brentwood, taking care of the girls, playing volleyball with friends in the yard, having parties, and traveling for fun rather than work. My memories of
Rhythm and Romance
continued to distress me, and I still felt a deep exhaustion from the experience. The very thought of going back into the studio was overwhelming and enervating. After a year went by, Rodney started to talk to me about ideas for a new record, but I made it clear that I was not interested, and resisted every idea he had. He grew more insistent, but I remained unmoved.

During this time I got a call from my dad, in which he made some small talk and then said, “I have to ask you something. What’s your royalty rate at Columbia?” I told him; he harrumphed, said, “Okay,” and hung up. Shortly afterward, Columbia dropped him. I was devastated for him and, embarrassed that I was still on the label, started thinking about bigger changes for myself.

Months went by until one afternoon when I was sitting in the kitchen of the log house and Rodney rushed in through the back door, his eyes wide. “I have the vision for your record,” he said excitedly. “I saw it all on the drive home from town.” He described it—sonically, thematically, musically, and emotionally—in great detail, and the more he talked, the more I was drawn in, so contagious was his excitement. What he described that day was almost exactly what
King’s Record Shop
turned out to be. He described a more roots-sounding record, not just in reaction to the heavy pop vibe of
Rhythm and Romance
, but as something fresh and more suited to my natural instincts. I studied Bob Dylan’s
Writings and Drawings
as if it were the Dead Sea Scrolls, and dissected Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt songs as exercises to better myself as a songwriter. I should, I thought, make a record that reflected
those
sensibilities. And most important, no big synthesizers and no executive producers.

We began recording on Valentine’s Day of 1987, and the engineers had flowers waiting for me in the studio. I wore my black leather biker jacket to the first day of sessions, thinking that sartorial toughness would make me less nervous. But there was no need. There was genuine camaraderie in the studio and no drama or struggle. I felt like I was part of a working band again, a sentiment that had been entirely absent during the previous project. The studio was comfortable, the engineering crew was soothing and accommodating, and Rodney and I hit a stride musically.

During the weeks in the studio, the engineers pirated a pay-per-view channel that was showing
Aliens
, and we had the film running in a continuous loop on a monitor above the recording console. Throughout each day we would look up to watch a few minutes of the film, until we could all recite the dialogue in our sleep and knew every scene forward and backward. I still have a strange visceral connection between
King’s Record Shop
and Sigourney Weaver and the terrifying creatures in that film. (Years later, the night of my first performance at Lincoln Center, my dear friend Liz Tirrell hosted a party for me after the show, which Sigourney attended. I told her about the bizarre association I had between her and the record, which seemed to amuse her.)

The musicians on the
King’s
sessions were phenomenal. The great Barry Beckett was on keyboards, Michael Rhodes played bass, Eddie Bayers was on drums, and Rodney had found a tremendously gifted guitarist, Steuart Smith, whom I had met for the first time when we were in preproduction a few weeks earlier. I didn’t understand Steuart’s working style at first and made fun of him a bit to Rodney. He seemed extremely obsessive and overly meticulous, and I sensed a self-consciousness in his demeanor that made me feel awkward. I slowly realized, over the course of the first few weeks of work, that Steuart was one of the most deeply sensitive musicians I had ever encountered, and that the depths of his soul came right out the ends of his fingers when he played. Living in mundane reality was often almost excruciating for Steuart. He is not the first artist I have known with so few defenses against the world, and certainly there have been many, many times I have felt that vulnerable and exposed myself. He became a collaborator and such an inspiration to me that when I produced
Interiors
a few years later, I sought him out for help with arrangements, and he proved invaluable.

During the first week of working on
King’s
, we recorded my dad’s song “Tennessee Flat-Top Box.” (I mistakenly thought it was in the public domain, its true author lost in the mists of time—an error that was made much of in the press later. Even my dad took out a full-page ad in the industry weeklies crowing about the fact that I hadn’t known he had written it before I recorded it. He was delighted. In fact, it was a simple mistake: I had known my dad’s version of the song for my entire life, the way that a child thinks that something she’s been familiar with since birth must have always been there.) Eddie Bayers stopped after the first take, drumsticks in hand and tears in his eyes, and said to the rest of the band, “Pay attention, boys. We won’t pass this way again.” Randy Scruggs came in to play the signature guitar line, which was an emotional and musically satisfying experience for me, and the record became a huge hit.

A few years prior, when Albert Lee had left my touring band, Rodney suggested that I bring in this guy named Vince Gill to play lead guitar, and he went so far as to hire him before I had ever played with him or even met him. I showed up at rehearsal for a tour for
Rhythm and Romance
the first day with Vince in the band with a huge attitude against him. I was barely civil. I was distraught over losing Albert and I had no confidence that Vince, who came from the band Pure Prairie League, could fill Albert’s shoes. During the very first song of the day, when it came to the guitar solo, Vince played a wicked, full-bore, wildly confident solo and I jerked my head around to look at him. I didn’t say anything, thinking it might be a fluke. In the second song, he upped the ante when the instrumental break came and I was riveted, and stunned. An hour later, when we took a break, I gave it up to him right away. “I didn’t think anyone could ever replace Albert,” I said. “I apologize. You are incredible.” He didn’t say a word, just pushed the back door open and walked outside and yelled at the top of his lungs. The tension broke for both of us and we became great friends. (Vince, of course, was meant for much bigger things than being anyone’s sideman.) He came in during
King’s
to put on some background vocals. I had recently been invited to sing on a Yoko Ono tribute called
Every Man Has a Woman
, a record that had been John Lennon’s idea. Yoko had asked me to sing a song called “No One Can See Me Like You Do,” and Vince had performed gorgeous background vocals. (Going to Yoko’s apartment in the Dakota to celebrate the release of the album was incredibly exciting for a diehard Beatles fan like myself. I had been so flustered when Rodney and I attended the party that I got out of the taxi and introduced myself to the doorman: “Hi, I’m Rodney Crowell, and this is Rosanne Cash.” He just looked at me without smiling, as I’m sure I wasn’t the first idiot to get dismantled by the proximity to John and Yoko.) I also recorded another John Hiatt song for
King’s
, “The Way We Make a Broken Heart.” It was a heady time for me, a pinnacle of success. But I wanted something else.

I
t was late in the making of
King’s
that I had a dream that changed my life.

I had met Linda Ronstadt a few times—in Los Angeles, while I was recording at Lania Lane; when I opened for Bonnie Raitt at the Greek Theater and Linda had come to see the show; and on a number of other occasions, as we traveled in the same circles and worked with many of the same musicians. Her record
Heart Like a Wheel
had profoundly affected me as a young girl, and I had studied it assiduously as a great example of a feminine point of view concept record, the best one since Joni Mitchell’s
Blue
, I thought, and equally important in the template I was creating for what I might do in my life. I especially admired her thoughtful song selection, which resulted in a very well-balanced album, and I wanted to make a record with a similarly unified concept, but as a songwriter.

Just as I was beginning to record
King’s
, I had read an interview with her in which she said that in committing to artistic growth, you had to “refine your skills to support your instincts.” This made such a deep impression on me that I clipped the article to save it. A short time after that, I dreamed I was at a party, sitting on a sofa with Linda and an elderly man who was between us. His name, I somehow knew, was Art. He and Linda were talking animatedly, deeply engrossed in their conversation. I tried to enter the discussion and made a comment to the old man. He turned his head slowly from Linda to me and looked me up and down with obvious disdain and an undisguised lack of interest. “We don’t respect dilettantes,” he spat out, and turned back to Linda. I felt utterly humiliated and woke from this dream shaken to the core. I had been growing uneasy in my role in the Nashville community and the music business as a whole. I thought of myself primarily as a songwriter, but I had written only three songs on
King’s
. I was famous and successful, but it felt hollow, and the falsehoods were piling up. With more success had come more pressure to be a certain way, to toe a certain line, to start a fan club (which I refused to do), to participate in big, splashy events, and to act as if the country music scene were a religion to which I belonged. I resisted the push to conform, to buy into a certain narrow aesthetic, and to become part of the established hierarchy. I didn’t want a lofty perch; I wanted to be in the trenches, where the inspiration was. My unease led me to that dream. Carl Jung said that a person might have five “big” dreams in her life—dreams that provoke a shift in consciousness—and this was my first.

From that moment I changed the way I approached songwriting, I changed how I sang, I changed my work ethic, and I changed my life. The strong desire to become a better songwriter dovetailed perfectly with my budding friendship with John Stewart, who had written “Runaway Train” for
King’s Record Shop
. John encouraged me to expand the subject matter in my songs, as well as my choice of language, and my mind. I played new songs for him and if he thought it was too “perfect,” which was anathema to him, he would say, over and over, “but where’s the MADNESS, Rose?” I started looking for the madness. I sought out Marge Rivingston in New York to work on my voice and I started training, as if I were a runner, in both technique and stamina. Oddly, it turned out that Marge also worked with Linda, which I didn’t know when I sought her out. I started paying attention to everything, both in the studio and out. If I found myself drifting off into daydreams—an old, entrenched habit—I pulled myself awake and back into the present moment. I opened my eyes and focused. Instead of toying with ideas, I examined them, and I tested the authenticity of my instincts musically. I stretched my attention span consciously. I read books on writing by Natalie Goldberg and Carolyn Heilbrun and began to self-edit and refine more, and went deeper into every process involved with writing and musicianship. I realized I had earlier been working only within my known range—never pushing far outside the comfort zone to take any real risks. I had written songs almost exclusively about romance and all the attending little dramas of loss and lust. It was legitimate, certainly, but only one small mode of transportation over a vast landscape of experience that might be fodder for whole new categories of songs. I started painting, so I could learn about the absence of words and sound, and why I needed them, and what I actually wanted to say with them. I took painting lessons from Sharon Orr, who had a series of classes at a studio called Art and Soul.

I remained completely humbled by the dream, and it stayed with me through every waking hour of finishing
King’s Record Shop
. We were so far into the process that it was too late to add songs or change the ones that were there, but I vowed the next record would reflect my new commitment. Rodney was at the top of his game as a record producer, but I had come to feel curiously like a neophyte in the studio after the dream. Everything seemed new, frightening, and tremendously exciting. I had awakened from the morphine sleep of success into the life of an artist.

The cover of the
King’s
album won a Grammy for best art direction. It was a photo of the actual King’s Record Shop in Louisville, Kentucky, hand tinted by Hank DeVito. I had seen the image at Hank’s house and begged him to retake the photograph with me standing in the doorway for my cover. He declined, as the hand tinting had been laborious, but he did agree to take my photo in a doorway and then digitally insert me into the original shot of King’s Record Shop. I didn’t actually visit the real store until the record was released, when we held a press conference there. Sadly, King’s Record Shop has gone the way of most mom-and-pop record stores and no longer exists.

I ended up having four number one singles off
King’s
, a first for a woman in the industry. Although it was my sixth album, I felt like a beginner, and I was relieved and grateful for the chance to start over, to go deeper into sound and texture, language and poetry, and the direction of my own instincts.

As I learned more about painting, I began to become obsessed with it. I was not a great visual artist by any stretch of the imagination, but I found a freedom in working with paint that I had never experienced as a musician. I grew curious to discover whether I could parlay the liberation I had felt on the canvas to the stage, from paint to my voice. I figured if I could experience it in one creative realm, I could find it in another. Painting so mesmerized me that I still remember going by myself one day to paint in one of the rooms in the warehouse where Sharon taught, working for hours and completely losing track of time. I became rattled when I discovered that it was nighttime and that I had been painting for five or six hours and was now alone in a warehouse in a dicey part of town. Attending a class with visual arts students was also a fresh way for me to cast off the trappings of fame, to unshackle myself from success and the expectations that went with it.

Not that I didn’t take advantage of that success—I renegotiated my contract with Columbia, which by then was a part of Sony, after
King’s Record Shop
and brazenly demanded an almost outrageous sum, but it seemed justified, as I not only had a lot of currency in the industry at that point, but I was angry about the fact that they had dropped my dad. I wanted parity from them, and at some level I didn’t care if they renewed my contract or not—I simply wanted to paint. They gave me the amount I asked for. My longtime business manager, Gary Haber, had the good sense to put half of it in an IRA and pay some bills, and the rest of it saw me through the enormous difficulties that were to come. I never again achieved the kind of chart success I had with
King’s
, and it took me years to recoup the advance that I had gotten from Sony. (In fact, when I left Sony in 1994, it was still unrecouped, and my new label, Capitol, had to take on my debt.)

As part of my attempt to unbind myself from language, I began listening obsessively to four records, all instrumentals: Miles Davis’s
Kind of Blue
and
Sketches of Spain
; the sound track for the movie
Cal
, written by Mark Knopfler; and Peter Gabriel’s sound track for Martin Scorsese’s film
The Last Temptation of Christ
. When I needed a reprieve from the intensity of those four, I listened to Vaughan Williams. Slowly I began to write new songs, as an adjunct to my painting, and I started to get more involved in political and environmental issues. I also became pregnant again. I cherish one particular image of myself that sums up that period of my life: Seven and a half months’ pregnant, and huge, I walked into a new painting class with a stack of voter registration cards and made an announcement that if anyone needed to register to vote, to see me. I can remember the shock on the students’ faces. I eventually grew so enormous that Sharon, the teacher, got nervous that I was breathing in too much paint and might go into labor in class, and suggested that perhaps I should resume after giving birth.

Carrie Kathleen (named for my dad’s mother, Carrie, and my sister Kathy) was born on December 12, 1988, almost two weeks overdue. She was a precious and welcome tonic in our lives at that moment, for we had moved from the log house into a big, featureless McMansion on Franklin Road in Nashville just a month before and were all feeling disoriented. Carrie was born only five months before Rodney’s dad died and eighteen months before my marriage to Rodney would end, and it seemed that she came into the family to bind us in love, steel us against loss, and connect all the disparate personalities, come what may. My mother had come from California to Nashville in late November to be present at her birth, but I was so overdue that she had to return home before I went into labor. When she finally did meet baby Carrie for the first time a few months later, she looked at her and said with awe, “Rosanne, she’s so special.” She was indeed, and has grown even more so. Carrie was my foxhole partner through divorce, moving to New York, remarriage, September 11—and any number of other traumatic and revolutionary experiences. She attended Barrow Street Nursery School in New York when she and I lived in our little apartment on Morton Street in the Village, then went to St. Luke’s on Hudson Street from pre-K through eighth grade, then to Rudolf Steiner High School on the Upper East Side for a year, and then she decided to finish her high school years with her dad in Nashville. Because she hates change and loves the safety of what she knows, that move represented a huge decision for her, one that required tremendous courage. I supported her in that decision, but God, I grieved when she left, fearing I would never have her in my house again. But true to her form, which is of deep family connection, community, and domesticity, after finishing high school and putting in one year of college in design school, she moved back home to New York and enrolled at the New School University and took a job at St. Luke’s, her old alma mater, teaching a cooking class to young children after school. She has never caused me a single problem. John, my husband, who took on the role of a father to her when she was three, loves her deeply. She has matured into an exotic beauty, with her grandmother Vivian’s Sicilian coloring and masses of black hair surrounding a heart-shaped face and feline eyes. She is quite heart-stopping, like a modern-day Claudia Cardinale, and remains dreamily unaware of the effect she has on men. John regularly gazes at her and sighs to me, “What do you think she’s going to do with all that beauty?” Usually he adds wryly, “Shouldn’t she marry a billionaire?” She is an odd little thing in many ways, highly sensitive to textures and colors and sounds, but she knows herself extraordinarily well, and she is proactive on her own behalf, always planning her life within the exact limits of her ability to navigate any given circumstance. She paints and draws, cooks and sews, and has dozens of skills and talents that I never dreamed of having. I thrill to her company, and just to the fact that she is in my life.

In 1989, when Carrie was about a year old, I had composed enough songs for a new album. (I was again on suspension from Columbia for being overdue in delivering a record.) The songs I had written were about the coming dissolution of my marriage—“postcards from the future,” as I called them later—though I didn’t realize it at the time. I didn’t recognize the themes of heartbreak and disappointment and the obsession with hidden disillusionment running through every song, but it was definitely there, and everyone but me seemed to notice. Intuitively I knew Rodney shouldn’t produce the record. He agreed, and I made appointments to meet with a few different producers I respected. I played Malcolm Burn the demos I had made of the new songs, and after listening quietly to all of them without commenting, he asked very directly when the tape ended, “And why aren’t you producing this yourself?” I stuttered a couple of reasons that I realized made little sense, and then finally admitted, “I don’t know.” After he left, I paced the length of the room for about an hour, thinking about the possibility and eventually growing excited. I thought I could do it.

The label agreed, and I called Steuart Smith to work on some arrangements for me. Because he lived near Washington, D.C., we mailed demos back and forth in preparation for recording. I had the idea of approaching the record as if it were a collection of Celtic songs and decided to make it nearly all acoustic. Also, I didn’t trust myself with drums—I was sick of the big snare sound of the eighties, and I didn’t want to spend hours sorting out drum sounds, as had been my habit in the previous fifteen years of recording. Even after that revelatory session with Glyn Johns in 1980, it had never really occurred to me that I could record drums differently, without the hyperfocus on the exact snare and tom and kick effects, but a more stripped-down, percussive rather than full-kit sound was just right for this particular group of songs. I hired Roger Nichols to record and mix the record, and I booked a studio at Masterfonics in Nashville because it had a great old Trident recording console and I wanted to record in analog. Every studio in Nashville, and in the entire country for that matter, was in the process of switching to digital, and the Neve board/Studer tape machine combination that I had grown to think of as the gold standard in recording was going the way of Betamax. There were few analog boards left in town, and that old Trident seemed like a great option for me. (After I finished the record, I was crushed to learn that the board was sold to a jingles studio.)

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