Johnny Cash - Songwriter (Mercury, 2024)

I have a deep respect for Johnny Cash. Not only he was one of the greatest songwriters of the American songbook, not only he has been also a collaborator of musicians such as Bob Dylan. He was also an interesting human being, even though controversial for many. For a long period a fervent Christian – “I’d rather know you hooked by heroin than hooked by Curch” told him some of his collaborators and close friends during those years – he, as an example, recorded a live album in the Folsom Prison, bringing some sparkles of truth with his music to the hosts of the prison. 

Honest and true to himself, Johnny Cash was able to put everything he encountered – faith, the good and the evil, the ghosts of depression, the joy of love – into his music at a level that is quite impossible for another less empathic and self-centered, in the best sense of the word, artist. After an out of focus period during the 1980s, thanks to Rick Rubin who had the great idea to let him play with basically only his voice and an acoustic guitar for many albums, Cash had another period of splendour during all the 1990s until his death. 

In his American Recordings series Johnny Cash released such beautiful and intense songs as Will Oldham’s I See a Darkness, Trent Reznor’s Hurt, Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus, obtaining great results from the works of the greatest artists of those years, sometimes pairing, sometimes going far beyond the originals in terms of intensity and interpretation. For all those reasons, I was quite curious of hearing the thirty minutes of music conveyed into this new, posthumous, The Songwriter. 

To tell the truth, almost everything is in its right place: the voice, the guitar, the hosts, like June Carter Cash or Dan Auerbach from The Black Keys, the many instruments that give shape to the music accompanying the vision of their author. But not everything is all right. To tell the truth, this collection of songs lacks coherence and a proper project. Everyone can hear that songs like Soldier Boy, Drive On – the more emotional, Poor Valley Girl are disposed the one after the other without a vision or a sense of togetherness. 

Recorded just a few time before the collaboration with Rick Rubin started giving life to albums where you can feel a narrative sense even if the single songs are different the one from the other, the songs on The Songwriter, that can also be found as charming per se, don’t give life to a proper album to tell you the truth. A nice companion for a proper Lp, as a second disc of outtakes, sold as a ‘new’ proper album of unedited material it doesn’t make a great sense at all. 

A similar operation to Montage of Heck, a project dedicated to some demos Kurt Cobain recorded at home and then published for mere exploitation, even if these Cash songs are well produced, refined, and feature many musicians – the list is impressing – cooperating to give life to a vibrant new album, the result is in my opinion similarly scarce. Obviously you’ll find some greatness sparks, but this is not the point …