New Johnny Cash music in 2024… who would’ve thought.
Today, the Johnny Cash estate released a new (to us) album from the Man in Black called Songwriter, which is a collection of songs solely written by Cash that were recorded in 1993 but never released.
On July 15th, 1986, Cash was dropped from his label home of 26 years, Columbia Records, which is where he essentially became the legend we know and love today. From there, he signed with Mercury, where he stayed from ’86 until 1991 when they parted ways, too.
And for a couple years in the early 90’s, Cash was actually without a label at all. He ultimately signed to Rick Rubin’s label, American, but during those couple years where he was an independent artist, Cash recorded quite a few demos of his own of songs he wrote completely by himself at Nashville’s LSI Studios.
But when he signed with Rubin, those tunes got pushed to the side and never saw the light of day. Cash’s son John Carter Cash recently rediscovered the stripped-back tapes, which were essentially just Cash singing with an acoustic guitar, and wanted to finish them and get them out to fans.
The album trailer explains it all quite well:
“In the early 90’s, Johnny Cash recorded an album of songwriting demos. 30 years later, the songs were taken to the Cash cabin, a hallowed place for Johnny, and stripped back to his vocals and guitar.
A hand-picked group of musicians came in and breathed new life into the tracks, taking the sound back to the roots and the heart of the songs. This is Johnny Cash, one of the greatest writers of all-time, and this is ‘Songwriter.’”
John Carter Cash co-produced the finished album with Cash’s longtime engineer David “Fergie” Ferguson, and they stripped the demos back to just his father’s vocals, re-recording the songs with a very talented group of musicians including Marty Stuart, Dan Auerbach, Vince Gill, and more.
Of course, I have seen some comments on the internet and social media questioning the ethics of releasing an album when an artist is no longer around to approve it or not, especially now considering the fact that they’re adding to the original demos and putting their own spin on it to a certain degree.
I think that’s a fair and necessary discussion to be had, but since John Carter Cash is now the owner of this music, he has the free will to do whatever he wants with it. And I’d be totally lying if I said I wasn’t really excited to hear brand new Johnny Cash tunes that we’ve never heard before…
Obviously, all of the songs are incredible, and exactly the kind of music we’ve all come to know and love from the country icon in terms of the gruff vocal delivery and songs that cut to the heart of the human experience in a way only Johnny Cash can.
From love songs to humorous tunes and even two that feature his friend and fellow Highwaymen member Waylon Jennings (who we can also expect never-before-heard music from next year) on background vocals on “I Love You Tonite” and “Like a Soldier,” it’s simply spectacular.
And obviously, it’s incredibly cool, for lack of a better word, to hear this capsule of music and moment in time that is as timeless now as it was in the 90’s. Every single song truly makes you feel like you’re stepping back in time , and you’ll definitely want to sit and stay a while.
I’ve listed a few of my early favorites below, but it goes without saying that the entire Songwriter record is well-worth your time to check out. The legend lives on, but then again, legends never really die and Johnny Cash is as great as he ever was on Songwriter.
