Not everyone feels as if they must accept death. With such concepts as ashes being launched into space and bodies turned into diamonds, death no longer is a solemn disappearance, but has shifted more into a spooky permanence. A person may be forgotten in the ground, but never when they’re winking expensively on a relative or a lover’s ring finger. There is a human wish for immortality which can surface subconsciously with every written word, recorded song, or brush stroke. There may not …

Between the years of 1970 and 1973, Johnny Cash quit drugs and alcohol, started a massively popular TV show on the ABC network, met with Richard Nixon, and recorded a number of children’s songs. Columbia Records has since remastered and re-released Johnny Cash’s Children’s Album (now for the first time on CD), the strange and beautiful document of a family-friendly, transitional period in the Man in Black’s life. Those who were children during the album’s initial 1975 release will enjoy this remastered …

Stunning. It’s the best word I can find for this unprecedented collection of music, 49 precious, newly discovered recordings by one of America’s most treasured musical giants. And while I’ll admit to being a bit of a Johnny Cash fanboy (these days, who isn’t?), this is one case where hyperbole is impossible. If you’re a fan of Cash to even the slightest degree — just an interest in his life or a desire to dig beyond his greatest hits is all that’s necessary …

Lately I’ve been reading Bob Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles. It’s fascinating stuff, of course; a vivid, evocative portrait of the artist’s formative years. But what really gets me is the way he tells it. Dylan’s prose — the breathless rush of words, the exuberant citing of influences from Hank Williams to Balzac — perfectly captures the feelings of a young, hungry, and unbelievably talented poet, hurtling forward to his artistic peak.
At times the youthful folksinger seems literally aflame with a kind of Biblical portent: …

It’s well known that in the two years before Rosanne Cash’s latest album was written and recorded, the singer-songwriter experienced the deaths of three loved ones: her stepmother, June Carter Cash, her father, Johnny, and finally her mother, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin. Such an ordeal would be profound for anyone, let alone someone with a family saga as troubled and as public (seen Walk the Line) as Cash’s; and as an emotional document of her loss, Black Cadillac is nothing short of spellbinding. …

Fashion, my young’uns, is a strange and fickle thing. Why, not too long ago in these parts, a hip young fella sayin’ he liked country music would’ve gotten himself laughed at – or worse, ostracized. Now I hear tell that you can walk into a De-troit indie club and find them scenesters wearin’ cowboy hats. Can you imagine that? ‘Course it’s all because of recent pop culture phenomena; bands like Blanche and the Johnny Cash revival which began with 1994′s American Recordings, peaked …

Walk the Line
Director: James Mangold
(20th Century Fox)
To me, Johnny Cash never really seemed cut out for the biopic treatment. Sure, he had all the prerequisites – humble roots in the Deep South, a revolutionary effect on American roots music, a successful struggle with drug addiction; all of which, applied to a different recently-deceased icon, helped make last year’s Ray such a resounding success. But Cash was never Ray Charles. With a black shadow longer than the man himself, and a voice which sounded more like a mystical, imaginary father figure …

Johnny Cash. Loretta Lynn. Neil Diamond?
Even given the late-’90s, early-2000s parade of classic singer-songwriter rebirths, I will be the first to admit that I didn’t see this one coming. Maybe you didn’t either. You might ask yourself – as I did – whether Neil Diamond really needs another look in this day and age. He is, after all, clearly not the icon Cash was and is; nor do his songs seem to require a sympathetic, reverent producer as urgently as did Lynn’s. To me, Diamond always seemed somehow content with …