Eleven unreleased Johnny Cash songs, which the country star recorded as demos in 1993 but never completed, will be released on a new album called Songwriter on June 28, writes The Guardian .
A single, Well Alright, was released on Tuesday with the announcement: a bold, passionate number about lust in the middle of the laundry, with a classic Cash opening verse: “I met her at the laundromat, washing real hot / I asked if you don’t need a little help with that big load you have?”.
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Featuring country singer Vince Gill and the rock band Black Keys as guests, the demos were mastered and recorded by a stellar team of musicians who had previously played with Cash, including guitarist Marty Stuart, drummer Pete Abbott and – before of his death in 2023 – upright bassist Dave Roe. Cash’s vocal performances from the demo recordings were added on top.
Cash’s son John Carter Cash co-produced the project with David “Fergie” Ferguson, the studio engineer who worked with Rick Rubin to record Cash’s impressive late-life suite of songs for American Recordings.
“No one plays Cash better than Marty Stuart, and Dave Roe, of course, played with Dad for many years,” said John Carter Cash. “They knew his energies, his movements and let him be the guide. It was like he had to sing with Johnny one more time, and that was it. That was the energy of creation.”
The demos were composed of songs that Cash had written over several years prior to 1993, while he was between two recording contracts. Before he could work them into a finished album, he met Rubin and became involved in the American Recordings project, which consisted of numbers by Cash alongside modern standards by Paul Simon and Leonard Cohen, as well as covers of unexpected appearances by artists such as Nine Inch Nails, Danzig and Bonnie “Prince” Billy.
Cash died in 2003 of complications from diabetes after releasing a fourth American Recordings album the previous year.
The new album’s opening track, Hello Out There, finds Cash unsettled by the state of the planet, singing: “Hello out there, this is planet Earth calling calling calling calling calling calling calling calling calling / Hello out there, our net worth is falling falling falling falling falling”. He also focuses on his own troubles, on Drive On – which was written amid chronic pain from a broken jaw in the early 1990s – and Like a Soldier, which reflects on his drug addiction. “It’s something he wrote after his first stint in a rehab — he felt like he was a soldier going through a war,” John Carter Cash said.
I Love You Tonite was written as a love song for June Carter’s wife Cash, while Poor Valley Girl – to which Gill added vocals – is about June and her fellow country musician and mother Maybelle Carter. Cash references James Taylor in She Sang Sweet Baby James, his home state of Arkansas in Have You Been to Little Rock? and remakes a 1962 Cash song, Sing It Pretty, Sue. Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys plays a guitar solo on the track Spotlight.
The album’s promotional materials promise songs about “love, family, sadness, beauty, spiritual redemption, survival, redemption and, of course, some of the lighthearted humor Johnny was known for.”
