Rosanne Cash has an awesome new cd called "Black Cadillac"! It is really good with some extremely moving songs. She lost her Dad, step mom and mother all within the last few years. My favorites so far are Black Cadillac, Like Fugitives, Burn Down This Town, Dreams are Not My Home and I Was Watching You...this song is amazing, I tear up every time I hear it. It is beautiful, about Johnny, wow! Kinda reminds me of Lisa's Nobody Noticed It, in that it so personal. I have been a Rosanne fan since Seven Year Ache, this cd is really special! I found this article about it and Rosanne.

------------------

The spirits around Rosanne Cash
Singer comes to terms with losses

NEW YORK (AP) -- The cameras had gone, so had the crowds. Rosanne Cash had often shared morning coffee with her father in the final months of his life, so the day after he was buried, she took her Starbucks cup to his grave at sunrise to visit him alone.

The world had just lost Johnny Cash, the music legend. She lost her dad.

She also lost stepmother June Carter Cash and her mother, Vivian Liberto Distin, who died last May -- on Rosanne's 50th birthday -- less than a month after being diagnosed with lung cancer.

Always an introspective songwriter as familiar with shadows as light, Cash poured her emotions into music. Her album "Black Cadillac," which went on sale January 24, looks starkly at life and death and her place in one of music's most famous families.

"It's not a tribute record," she told The Associated Press. "I don't want people to think it is. It's an exploration of loss and memory and ancestry and what survives death, but it's my inner perspective."

Her family's celebrity made grief a public as well as private experience. Cash received wonderfully touching letters, and some hurtful ones, too. She'd turn on the television to see a nice tribute, then change the channel to hear people who didn't know what they were talking about speak authoritatively about her dad.

"People would come up to me in Starbucks and talk about their grief in losing Johnny Cash and start crying, when I was in mourning myself," said Cash, who lives in New York. "That was intrusive."

Writing about the experience was both compulsion and therapy.

"I lost sleep over these songs," she said. "I couldn't think about anything else. Some songs were so consuming that I couldn't function in my life until they were done."

The disc's two centerpieces explore the idea of life beyond the body. On "I Was Watching You," Cash sings from both the perspective of a soon-to-be soul watching her parents get married, and also as her dad following his passing. "Long after life," she sings. "There is love."

Foreboding
Cash is also comforted in "The World Unseen" by the belief that her father lives on, particularly in the memories of those he left behind. She promises to "look for you in the rhythm of my bloodstream."

Christmas Eve church services inspired her at a key moment in writing the song. Listening to the Christmas carol "We Three Kings," she scribbled words on her program, and incorporated the phrase "westward leading, still proceeding" to describe the passage into the world unseen. Cash gives the song a muted, intimate reading -- at least partly because she recorded it in one take at midnight after flying to Los Angeles for her first session with producer Bill Bottrell.

The title cut, with imagery of a casket driven away in a black Cadillac, is spooky because it was written six weeks before June Carter Cash began the parade of funerals.

"I'm not the first person to notice that creative efforts happen in a nonlinear way," Cash said.

Given her father's illness, it wasn't surprising these thoughts were on her mind. When she was through writing, the song filled her with a sense of foreboding.

The burbling music is inspired by the Doors crossed with early U2, with surrealistic trumpets quoting her father's "Ring of Fire."

Moviegoers have seen a depiction of Rosanne in "Walk the Line," mostly as a scared little girl watching her father's drug abuse and splintering marriage to her mother. Unlike Cash's sister, Kathy, who complained the film portrayed her mother as a shrew, Rosanne said it was an accurate portrait of a woman simply fighting to save her family.

Although she later made peace with her father's behavior, her song "Burn Down This Town" shows some scars. During his infrequent visits home, her father liked to set fires on their property; one got so wild their house almost ignited.

"My dad was always gone and we felt so isolated," she said. "I thought, don't stop at the hillside, just burn the whole town down. Burn my childhood while you're at it."

It's not her angriest song, though. Told she had a month to write something else after her mother died, Cash responded with "Like Fugitives," which lashes out most directly at religion.

Cash remains bitter at how her mother, a Catholic, was shunned by her church for many years after her divorce. And many supposedly religious people sent Cash angry mail after she spoke out against the Iraq war. Your God-fearing daddy would be ashamed, they wrote, "not realizing that he was as opposed to it as I was," she said.

"I didn't want to believe in their God -- that punitive, vengeful, angry guy," she said. "That's not the God that I believe in and I resent people trying to project their God into my life."

She's proud of the work. The album was half-produced by Bottrell and half by her husband, John Leventhal, but so seamlessly that most listeners won't be able to tell the difference. She figures many music fans her age -- even those who don't come from a famous family -- will relate to the emotions of losing parents.

"The paradox of it is that this is a record I want so much to share with my parents," she said, "to say, look, I wrote this with a much fuller sense of who you are in my life and what my ancestry is, and to look at you before I was born. And yet I can't share this with you.

"That's a point of real sadness for me," she said, "although part of me knows that they know."

Really cool Thanx

It's great to see someone else loving this CD! I've never been a huge fan of hers. . .just liked a song here and there. . .but I started seeing some reviews of this CD just after it came out and became very intrigued. So I had to get it. and i just love it. some amazing song writing. . .

I took a copy to my dad and told him he had to listen to it. He's a big fan of Johnny and June's, but not of Roseanne. He didn't want to listen to it. . .I told him he had to. He prefers old time country and bluegrass. . .I told him to ignore the music if he had to, but to listen to the lyrics because they give you quite a perspective.

My favorite songs are Black Cadillac, I Was Watching You, God is in the Roses, & Like Fugitives. (all of these I immediately could relate to events in my own life. . .pretty powerful)

I think this is one of those CD's that no matter what genre of music you prefer, you need to listen to it. if for nothing else, the beautiful writing that went into the lyrics!

I've always loved her music.

Me too Quinn!

I have been playing this cd alot, really all the songs are good! "The World Unseen" has some amazing lyrics! I agree Min, this is a cd everyone should listen too. It should't be labled as a particular music type! It really isn't that country, maybe a song here and there. All I can say is she sure as heck better get some Grammy nods for this cd!!!

Rosanne Cash is on Leno tonight and Ellen on Thursday!

how did your dad like it min73?
I'm gonna have to listen to this album.

You know. . .my dad hasn't said anything about it. . .I guess I should ask him. I do know my mom listened to it, which really surprised me. She liked some of it, and had issues with some of the lyrics in a couple songs. . .but that's my mother , she doesn't live in reality.

Thanks for the heads up Besty...I was able to see it...She was really good!

Walk the line comes out tomorrow on video...I cant wait to see it!

I thought Rosanne was great, I love that song! I saw Walk the Line in the theater and loved it! I am going to get the dvd too! I always knew of Johnny & June, but I learned so much from this movie! It makes Rosanne's songs on this cd even more meaningful. Good stuff! She's on Ellen Thursday!

I missed it today. But Walk the Line was fantastic! Great movie

I haven't seen Walk the Line yet, but my bro went opening night at the theater. had to stand in line for a LONG time but got a free t-shirt outta it!

Rosanne was great on Ellen today. And after she sang, she told about the meaning behind Black Cadillac. she said her mom bought a new one every year and every year her dad wrecked it. . .they had a good laugh over it. . .

Ellen should be repeated on the Oxegyn channel Thursday at 11:00pm! Rosanne rocked!

Rosannne is on the the Late, Late Show..Craig Fergason tonight.