Cash’s ‘Redemption Day’ still resonates with Crow
Sheryl Crow remembers everything about the day she first heard her words being sung by Johnny Cash.
It was 2003, and just two weeks earlier, the country legend had surprised her with a phone call. He told her he wanted to record her song “Redemption Day,” a deep cut on her 1996 sophomore album.
Before she knew it, she’d received a cassette tape in the mail.
“It was so profound to me,” Crow recalls. “To have someone of his stature and his integrity take a song that I’d written and truly make it his own.”
Just three months later, Cash died at age 71. His version of “Redemption Day” wasn’t heard by the public until 2010, when it appeared on his posthumous album “American VI: Ain’t No Grave.”
On Friday, Crow released a new version of “Redemption Day,” combining Cash’s recorded vocals with her own. She says his performance has that same profound effect on her, 16 years later.
The song also will be part of her upcoming album — a years-in-the-making collection of collaborations with her friends and heroes, including Keith Richards, Stevie Nicks and Joe Walsh — set to be released this summer.
Crow wrote “Redemption Day” in the mid-’90s after visiting Bosnia to perform for U.S. troops stationed there.
“I was just so emotional about what I’d seen … an extremely war-torn area and what it does to the people who have to live through it,” she says. “And then I came home, and everything on TV was capturing the genocide in Rwanda. It evoked some confusion in my mind as to why we go into some areas, and some areas we don’t go into.”
“Was there no oil to excavate,” she sang in the final verse. “No riches in trade for the fate/ Of every person who died in hate?”
Those words resonated with Cash. In fact, he went through the song line by line with Crow to ensure he could stand behind every lyric.
He recorded his version during the first months of the Iraq War, and according to Crow, that wasn’t a coincidence.
“There were a lot of misconceptions about our reasoning for going in. There was also a lot of very blurry back story as far as weapons of mass destruction,” she says. “And I think he felt like the song needed to come out at that moment, as a retort.”
The “Redemption Day” duet is the second topical track to be shared from Crow’s still-untitled album. Last year, she and indie rocker St. Vincent released “Wouldn’t Want to Be Like You,” a song about lies and cover-ups she has connected to President Donald Trump, Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort.
“For a person who isn’t the new kid on the block, and isn’t competing to get on the radio, I feel like there’s a liberation in that,” Crow says. “Being able to really address the elephant in the room through my music.”
But that’s not to say that all of the upcoming album’s tracks have a topical bent. Crow says each song is “orchestrated” to the guest it features, and one of the album’s best songs, she believes, is a lighthearted one with Walsh.
“It talks about how everything may be youth-oriented, but these still are the good old days for people who are getting older. We’re still rocking out, and we’re still having fun. That is not reserved just for the young people.”
She began work on the album several years ago, out of “a strong desire to have musical moments with the people that I love and have been inspirations for me.” But she says it’s also about “paying it forward.”
“There are so many young people that are inspiring me now, that I feel like are carrying the mantle, writing songs that speak to what’s going on. People that can play and write and are the real deal. Brandi Carlile, Gary Clark Jr., Maren (Morris), Jason Isbell and Margo Price. It’s been a real project of love and joy, and there was a moment when I said, ‘OK, I have to be done, or I’m going to keep doing this for 10 years.’ “
Crow’s untitled album is set to be released this summer on The Valory Music Co.