ROSANNE CASH Union Chapel, London, July 24, 2018
Backed by husband John Leventhal, the country star continues to refresh the genre
Cash ploughs fresh furrows between folk and country
RoSANNE Cash is a restless artist. At a time when she could be coasting, she keeps pulling her music in new directions. Earlier in the summer, she collaborated with Ry Cooder on an evening of her father’s songs, an idea she had resisted for 40 years. Now, accompanied only by her husband and musical partner John Leventhal, she keeps on digging, remoulding her past work, tentatively introducing new material, all the while reframing her own reputation.
It’s easy to underestimate the importance of Leventhal. He doesn’t get equal billing on the records, but he’s as important to Cash’s mature sound as David Rawlings is to Gillian Welch. Leventhal is not a country player, he’s an explorer. occasionally, he’ll issue a flurry on the guitar before the song starts properly – there’s a Hawaiian prelude to Bobbie Gentry’s “ode To Billie Joe” which plays with the geography of the song, and he prefaces “Long Black Veil” with what sounds like an argument between his fingers. When Cash sings, he drops back into the shadows, allowing the bell-like clarity of her voice to ring out; when they harmonise, the effect is like smoke hitting sunlight. “You don’t hear the word ‘scaffold’ on Top 40 radio so much anymore,” Cash notes at the end of this tale of infidelity and death. Neither do you often hear pop songs – including some of Cash’s country hits – reshaped so that they resemble hymns. It’s a subtle process, encouraged by the gaps in Leventhal’s playing as much as the off-kilter detail he supplies, but there’s no doubt about it. When Cash plays “Seven Year Ache”, it’s a sobering experience, an emotional reckoning, now with extra ache. It’s the same on “Blue Moon With Heartache”, a country No 1 from 1981. The song details a bruising relationship but, freed from its more generic original arrangement, the sense of emotional chill is quite brutal.
Cash has been re-evaluating her old material recently. A 30th-anniversary edition of King’s Record Shop came out last year, offering a reminder of how Cash carved out the space later to be occupied by New Country. She had four No 1s from that album – a first for a female country artist – and her reading of the John Hiatt-penned “The Way We Make A Broken Heart” is beautifully spartan. Also from that record, her encore reworking of Johnny Cash’s “Tennessee Flat Top Box”, with the crowd supplying the rhythm and Leventhal turning the guitar part inside out, is like something from a lively communion.
The urgency is dialled up a notch on a tune from the musical Cash and Leventhal are writing about a woman who works in a textile mill in North Carolina. And a song from Cash’s forthcoming album Rabbit
Hole is played live for the first time. It’s a nervous moment. The tune is fluffed, only for Cash to re-start. “Do you have it now?” teases Leventhal, “I had it five minutes ago.” The highlight of the night is “Everyone But Me”, also from the new record. It’s a Celtic lament, containing a chilling line addressed to the singer’s absent mother and father. “Now that you
gone…” she sings, “it’s not nearly long enough, still it seems too long.”
There are flickers of disagreement when Leventhal urges Cash to sing Dylan’s “Farewell Angelina”. The lyrics are on a sheet at the singer’s feet, but she doesn’t have her glasses. The stage lights are turned up, and in the end, the tune is delivered flawlessly, Cash ploughing fresh furrows between folk and country, Leventhal carrying it home with a festive turn on the piano.