Description
New Johnny Cash Album, ‘Songwriter,’ Brings to Light 11 Original Compositions He Recorded but Never Released in 1993.
More than 20 years after his death, there are treasures in the Johnny Cash vault that have remained unmined, despite assumptions that everything interesting might have been brought into the light in the posthumous recordings that came out in the years following his 2003 death. On June 28, Universal Music will issue “Songwriter,” a collection of 11 previously unreleased recordings that Cash demo-ed in 1993, all of them self-penned originals.
These original compositions make for an intriguing find, given that the country legend was a revered songwriter when he set his mind to it, yet he primarily relied on outside material throughout his career. Only two of the 11 self-written songs in the set were ever re-recorded and released in any form: “Drive On” and “Like a Soldier,” which appeared in different form on the first album Rick Rubin produced for Cash, “American Recordings.”
The recordings Cash made in 1993 at LSI Studios in Nashville were demos, not completed tracks. To bring them into public view now, the singer’s son, John Carter Cash, gathered musicians at the famed Cash Cabin in Hendersonville, Tenn. to create new backing tracks to augment his newly rediscovered vocals. Carter Cash found his co-producer for the fresh sessions in David “Fergie” Ferguson, who intimately knew the Man in Black’s sound, having engineered projects for the star for 30 years (including work on the final albums with Rubin).
