Dad wasn’t political but he hated war ... he was a man of peace

sibility of the right artists finishing these, putting music to them.

“The ones that wound up on the record are things that I believe he would have wanted to share.”

Each artist on the new album loved Cash’s music, and took the responsibility seriously.

“I saw some of the artists look down at the words for the first time, and the song would just come straight out,” John Carter explains.

“I happened to be recording Brad Paisley when he sang Gold All Over The Ground, pretty much spontaneously after reading the lyrics.

“Steve Berkowitz (co-producer on Forever Words) was there when Elvis Costello wrote I’ll Still Love You sitting at the piano, again looking at those words for the first time.

“Some people took longer and were very careful about it. Chris Cornell took a few weeks to sit back and come up with You Never Knew My Mind.

“You can read whatever into it, but when (Cornell) wrote that he was in a really good space.

“I met him backstage at a Johnny Cash show in the mid1990s after Kurt Cobain died.

“I walked up to Chris because Soundgarden had changed my life when I was 19 years old in 1989. I introduced myself, and he said, ‘Your dad has influenced me musically as much as any other artist, if not the most’, so I knew he would be excited to be part of it (the album).

“It had to connect to his life, and my dad wrote those words in 1967 when he was in a divorce with his first wife, Vivian.

“Chris had been through the same, so my dad’s words connected deeply.”

That emotional outpouring opened the door for Cornell to do the same, he suggests. There were two lyrics — “You never knew my mind” and “I never knew your mind” — and Cornell edited them together before reaching the last line, “I never really knew your mind”.

“By then, you understand what he had gone through,” John Carter says. “It’s an epic.”

He knew Kris Kristofferson — an ex-member of supergroup The Highway Men (along with Cash, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings) — would contribute. Cash wrote the lyrics that would become Forever/I Still Miss Someone in one of the last weeks of his life — the chorus from I Still Miss Someone was written after the death of his wife, June, and Kristofferson was one of his best friends. Having him recite over Nelson’s guitar was exactly right.