ROSANNE CASH
The Americana dynast talks prescience, fury and Elvis Costello.
Johnny’s daughter, in Confidential mode, talks punk rock, concept albums and how she likes, well, adolescent humour.
IT’S BEEN a very shitty year for being an American,” says Rosanne Cash. She’s calling from her home in New York City, birthplace of the man responsible for her anguish, President Donald Trump. “I thought that progress was steady, so it is really shocking to find where we are today.” Rosanne, the award-winning singersongwriter and the oldest of Johnny Cash’s four daughters, seems to have inherited her father’s gravity, intensity and willingness to call out injustice. Her first new studio album in five years, She Remembers Everything, has just been released. Rather than write an anti-Trump protest set, however, she says, “for me it’s more subversive to write from the moral authority of my own experience. I still have a lot to say.”
What’s the significance of your new album’s title?
When I wrote that song, I was thinking about trauma and loss, and I started to feel it really would be an incredible burden to remember everything that happened to you in your life, though at the same time it is a comfort to think that it might be locked in some kind of psychic library somewhere. It turns out this was kind of prescient, given what’s gone on in this country with the [Supreme Court Justice] Kavanaugh hearings and the #MeToo movement. Because partly this album is about what it is to be a woman in 2018 America. The alarm and fury. But some of the songs are older, and are about madness and sacrifice and compassion.
The song Eight Gods Of Harlem features your occasional supergroup CCK – Cash, Costello, Kristofferson.
Elvis and I go way back. I had written the first verse – I’ve been involved in anti-gun violence for 20 years and the song came from that – and I just saw Kris and Elvis and I writing this song together. They both said yes. Then it was a matter of figuring out the one day in the year that we would all be in New York together. In fact, we wrote the rest of Eight Gods in the studio that same day. It was amazing, with Elvis and I looking to Kris like he was the great oracle and both of us kind of kissing the hem of his garment. (Laughs)
Your dad was famous for themed long-players.
Actually, when I started out I think my goal was to make the perfect concept album. That was partly by osmosis from my dad’s records like [Sings] Ballads Of The True West and Bitter Tears [Ballads Of The American Indian]. But I loved Tommy by The Who as well. Then later, Lou Reed’s Magic And Loss had a huge impact. It turns out that this record does have somewhat of an overriding theme. It’s gothic Feminism, capital ‘F’.
Are female country singers allowed to be gothic feminists? Doesn’t it clash with the gingham dresses?
Well I never would have been that kind of girl anyway, because I grew up in southern California and I was a huge fan of Janis Joplin and the Jefferson Airplane. I am a feminist. I mean, I love men and I am a heterosexual woman, but I was just so tired of that male narrative. And that male kind of prism that we’re sort of forced to look through often – you know, this female experience just seems like madness to them sometimes, and yet it’s a thing of great beauty and power. So I just had to go there and write from my own experience.
You had just turned 20 when punk broke out. Is there a secret punk past we don’t know about?
I really, really loved certain elements of punk. I lived in London at the height of punk, you know, and I remember going to the Roundhouse and seeing all those bands. The Sex Pistols, The Clash, the Pretenders, who I worshipped. But I mean, I’m a nice girl (laughs), so it would have been hard for me to take on that punk persona. But at the same time it helped me refine my own edge.
Tell us something you’ve never told an interviewer before.
I love adolescent boy humour and all those Jonah Hill movies [Knocked Up; 40-YearOld Virgin; etc]. And I have a crush on Jason Bateman.
She Remembers Everything is out now on Blue Note.
“This record… it’s gothic Feminism, capital ‘F’.” ROSANNE CASH