Rosanne CashBlack Cadillac
Capitol Records
Reviewed by Tracy M. Rogers
In the two years since the release of her last album, The Rules of Travel, Rosanne Cash has witnessed the deaths of all three of her parents – her stepmother June Carter Cash, her father Johnny Cash, and her mother Vivian Liberto Cash Distin. Her latest CD, Black Cadillac, examines the turbulent emotions of letting go of loved ones. An exploration of loss, longing, anguish, heartache, faith, uncertainty, acceptance, redemption, and hope, Black Cadillac is perhaps Cash’s most personal album to date, a re-evaluation of her world view, faith, and the concept of love after the loss of her parents. With songs tied together lyrically by reminiscences and realizations, Black Cadillac is also Cash’s most musically eclectic album – featuring rock, blues, folk, soul, jazz, and country influences – alternating between fast and slow tempos, rocking guitar numbers and sentimental piano ballads.
Black Cadillac begins with the bass-heavy title track, an tribute to Cash’s father in which the images of two very different black Cadillacs – one her father drove in his younger days and one taking him to his final resting place – unify the song about the loneliness that ensues after the loss of a parent. An old recording of Johnny Cash talking to his eldest daughter launches the song and casts an eerie pall, elucidating the sense of loss conveyed in the song. “Radio Operator,” on the other hand, has the rockabilly feel of one of her father’s early songs reworked for the 21st century, an up-tempo rocker that belies the longing of Cash’s lyrics. An ode to her parents love story, “Radio Operator” finds Cash singing of her father’s Air Force days as a Morse code interceptor needing to reach “the girl in San Antone” (a clear reference to Cash’s mother) and ends with the certain, haunting refrain “this message will not end.”
As the Black Cadillac winds on, the stages of Cash’s grief become more pronounced, both musically and lyrically. “I Was Watching You” is a lilting, yet anguished piano ballad, filled with sadness and hope, that tells the story of Cash’s parents’ marriage in which she sings “after it all falls apart there is love.” The final verse of “I Was Watching You” serves as an affirmation of her father’s faith that, even though loved ones are longer in our physical world, they are still present in spirit, watching over us. The final verse serves as a turning point in the song, a place where lyrics and music become more optimistic, standing in marked contrast to the woefulness of the first two verses. The following track, “Burn Down This Town,” offers a marked contrast – sinister blues guitar and a rowdy rock rhythm undercut lyrics laced with pain and anger about Cash’s desire to escape from all remnants of her past, the memories, mementos, the grief. “God is in the Roses,” meanwhile, is a poetic, wistful Celtic-tinged folk song about acceptance of one’s own mortality in which Cash finds God in all things pleasant and painful, in the cemeteries and the sunny skies, in the roses and their thorns. “I love you like a brother – a father and a son. It may not last forever, ever, but it never will be done,” she croons over mandolin and piano accompaniment.
Personal memories and longing infuse “House on the Lake,” a folk-blues boogie about the Cash family home in Tennessee in which Cash offers a glimpse into the life shared by her father and stepmother. Once again loss and sadness permeate – “I blink, and, while my eyes are closed, they both have gone away,” she half-whispers, half-sings over blues-infused acoustic guitar and slide electric guitar. Cash’s bittersweet longing comes to its zenith in the next song, “The World Unseen,” a melancholy pop song featuring brush drums, muffled guitar, and moody lead piano in which Cash searches plaintively for her father’s spirit in all that surrounds her, “in Memphis and the miles between,”“in morphine and in dreams,” in the music and bloodlines they shared. “You must be somewhere in the stars,” she laments as the music crescendos, “because from a distance comes the sound of your guitar.” “The World Unseen” is Cash’s magnum opus for a lost father whose spirit was too big for heaven or earth, as well as her most lyrically poetic song in an album filled with poetry. “The World Unseen” also serves at Cash’s greatest expression of her grief – “I’m a mirror in the hall. From your empty room I can hear it fall,” she whispers. “Like Fugitives,” by contrast, finds Cash at her most gritty and most scathing, practically bellowing the angry chorus and refrain – “It’s a strange new world we live in where the church leads you to hell, and the lawyers get the money for the lives they divide and sell. And, the only world believed in is the one up on the screen. So, we all just live like fugitives when we were meant to live like queens.” A seething rocker with distorted guitar, “Like Fugitives” serves as both a commentary on the failure of organized religion and the politics of death in our society.
As the album winds down, the music becomes more eclectic, the lyrics more personal. “Dreams are Not My Home” is a funky, bass-driven pop-dance song about escapism and the desire to live in the moment that underscores the inability to cope with the here and now when facing tremendous loss, while “Like a Wave” is a morose ballad about Cash’s eternal love for her parents featuring moody guitars and reverberating percussion. The album concludes with two quite disparate songs – “World Without Sound” and “The Good Intent.” The former is a horn- and electric piano-driven rocker about feelings of abandonment and questioning beliefs in the face of grief, the latter a tender folk chantey where the title ship brings her father’s family to America, eventually landing the family in Arkansas to work the land. “The Good Intent” finds Cash embracing the heartache, trials, and triumphs of her father’s family history and begins with a recording of Rosanne as a child saying “bye-bye-bye” to her father, a prophetic opening for the song of his life and ancestry. The final track on Black Cadillac, “0:71,” is a chilling moment of silence for those lost that elucidates the weight and intangibility of Cash’s losses. In the end, is there really anything that can be said to convey such incomprehensible losses?
Black Cadillac is a devastating but hopeful journey into Rosanne Cash’s personal landscape and grieving process, a musically eclectic, lyrically profound tale of loss that finds Cash questioning the nature of faith and love and finding that “long after life there is love.”