ROSANNE CASH
Black Cadillac
Capitol/EMI
· Johnny Cash's daughter mourns and celebrates her father, mother, and stepmother.
Rosanne Cash's 1981 single "Seven Year Ache" foreshadowed a career chronicling life's complexities, including marital breakdown on 1990's Interiors and 1993's The Wheel. Black Cadillac was recorded during a two-year period that saw the deaths of her father, stepmother June Carter Cash and mother Vivian Liberto. On the title track, the repercussions of Cash's loss turn the mariachi horns of "Ring of Fire" into a dirge. Unlike her parents, who could turn to their well-documented religious beliefs, Cash only wishes she was a Christian on the New Orleans funeral "World Without Sound" (as if for her – and us – Johnny Cash's death was marked by the absence of his distinctive voice, heard here in snippets of conversation with a baby Rosanne), but finds little in a church that "leads you to hell" on "Like Fugitives." Instead, Cash finds solace in The Beatles (subtly cited on "God is in the Roses" and "World Without Sound") and Nirvana (on "Black Cadillac" and "Like Fugitives"), two recent and publicly shared examples of loss. Couched in mandolins, slide guitar and piano by producers Bill Bottrell and John Leventhal, Black Cadillac makes Cash's hurt public, offering another musical consolation to those who share her grief, for her parents or their own.
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