24 Nov 2018

Rosanne Cash - She Remembers Everything

From Saturday Morning, 10:04 am on 24 November 2018

Rosanne Cash has been performing since she was 18 when she toured with her famous father Johnny.

Rosanne Cash

Rosanne Cash Photo: Supplied / Michael Lavine

She became influential in the 'New Wave' of country music in the late 1970s and 1980s before quitting the Nashville scene for Manhattan 28 years ago.

In 2014 she re-acquainted herself musically with the southern states and made the album The River and the Thread with her husband of 23 years John Leventhal.

She tells Kim Hill she has a conflicted relationship with the south where she was born in 1955, the eldest daughter of Johnny and his first wife Vivian Liberto.

"I've lived in New York City for 28 years and I always felt myself as a New Yorker, so it's really not about my parents, it's more about where I belong and I just couldn't live in the south.

"Some parts of it are just far too conservative for me for one thing and I like being near water and I married a native New Yorker."

Cash grew up amidst the chaos of her parents' troubled marriage, which was marred by her father's addictions, affairs and touring lifestyle. Despite it all, she says she has no lingering resentment over Johnny's wayward lifestyle.

"I've resented both my parents - my mother was no day at the beach, I'm telling you - she was enraged at my father and deeply hurt and that came out in a lot of unhealthy ways. So in some ways I've resented her more."

But she doesn't believe Johnny's behaviour is to blame for how her mother brought her up.

Johnny Cash

Johnny Cash Photo: Johnny Cash

"She was an adult, she made her choices, and I think he was in the grips of his drug addiction and that plays out pretty much the same in all drug addicts and their families; the chaos and the fear, the confusion and all that.

"And I saw that my mother had more of a choice in her behaviour. But at this point in my life, to resent my parents just seems so .. the shelf life of that is so past. People my age who still resent their parents - it seems so ungraceful and inappropriate."

Parenthood, she says, has also given her a different perspective.

"You're gonna screw it up, you just are. In some ways you're going to do it fantastic and perfect and in other ways you are going to screw it up, and it's the same for every single parent. So once you have kids you are more forgiving."

Cash is a long time anti-gun violence campaigner and recently wrote in article in the New York Times, urging country music colleagues to stand up against the National Rifle Association (NRA).

"The NRA has kind of woven itself into this idea of country music, patriotism and guns and they have been sponsoring country music artists on tours. 

"There are some country music artists that have fiscal relationships with the NRA and I just thought it was so insidious and we had to start unwinding these threads, that patriotism did not mean guns, it did not necessarily mean country music and the three were not to be conflated."

Cash says many non-country musicians supported her stance, but Nashville - not so much.

"I didn't get much agreement from the country music community to tell you the truth, from the people I know who are more in pop or rock music it was like 'right on, I'm glad you wrote it' but from the country music community ... crickets."

Along with silence, she also got "pushbacks".

"Oh, you know, the things they always say. 'It takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun' which is utter, ridiculous nonsense because plenty of good guys with guns get killed - it just happened in Thousand Oaks,California.

"Then they attack me personally. I just don't care, the truth is I'm too old to care what people say about me anymore. This is something I have such strong convictions about our gun laws are morally wrong and I wont stop believing that."

Rosanne Cash

Rosanne Cash Photo: supplied

Cash has just released her 14th album She Remembers Everything. One track on it, '8 Gods of Harlem' - co written with Elvis Costello and Kris Kristofferson - is about the senselessness of gun violence in America.

"I was walking down into the subway and an Hispanic woman was coming up out of the subway off the A-train from Harlem and she was very sad looking and she was talking to herself and I thought she said 'ocho dios'.

"I don't speak Spanish, but I knew that meant 'eight gods' and I couldn't get that line out of head and then I read about another shooting in Harlem and I wrote that first verse of 8 Gods of Harlem.

"And I called Kris Kristofferson and Elvis Costello and said 'do you want to write a song with me? I have this one I've written the first verse for' and they wrote their own verses and we recorded it that very same day."

The title track 'She Remembers Everything' was written just before the Me Too movement came to the fore, she says.

"I wrote the lyrics and Sam Phillips - who's a wonderful, wonderful songwriter - wrote the music, and we wrote it just before the Me Too movement.

"I was thinking about the trustworthiness of a woman's memory and about even if we don't have these memories in our mind all the time that they are held in our bodies and held in some kind of library of consciousness that if we needed them we could pull them out.

"I was thinking about who we are before trauma. So all of these issues were at the forefront of my mind when I was writing those lyrics and then came the Me Too movement and the Kavanagh hearings."

Cash has had to deal with a number of crises in her life. Like her father, she had problems with substance abuse in the early 1980s and then later, on two occasions, completely lost her voice.

"I had polyps twice, one time I lost my voice for 14 months another time for five months. It did shake me up, I thought 'well, that's it for me, I'm not going to sing anymore'.

"It was heartbreaking and I didn't expect it to be heartbreaking. That was a shock, because I always identified myself first as a writer and thought if I lost my voice it wouldn't be that great a loss.

"Well, it turns out it was an enormous loss and it was far more of my self-identity than I thought it was."

Her voice recovered without the need for surgery and she says she's singing stronger than ever now. Then she had to endure major brain surgery for a malformation in her brain in 2007.

"They had to open up my skull and move my cerebellum,"

Cash took a long time to recover from the operation, she says.

"The pain went on and on and on, it was just awful."

But she says she seems to have a natural resilience.

"There've been a lot of other problems in my life and you think 'this will take me down', and then you bounce back. I'm really an optimist at bottom and I just always think things are going to turn out well no matter how bad it gets."

No caption

Photo: Supplied

And Cash says after all these years she's - mostly - comfortable as the daughter of a country music legend.

"Sometimes I still feel uncomfortable in my skin, but most of the time I feel comfortable in my skin and I think that is just the result of hard work: in my work the writing and performing and what I do in the world and hard work inside myself, because I wanted to live a satisfying life.

"I didn't want to be bitter, I didn't want my fear or self doubt or resentment to dismantle me.

"I feel really fortunate to do what I do in this world - and I did have to work for it, it wasn't handed to me."

She Remembers Everything is released on Blue Note