Rosanne Cash's losses, including the death of her father Johnny, have not dimmed her optimism, she tells Tony Clayton-Lea.
Songs, says Rosanne Cash, can be postcards from your future. There is no way of telling how things will turn out; whatever you write can be interpreted in different ways, and whether you're deemed to be soothsayer or carrier of bad news depends on what takes place. She could not, for example, have predicted five years ago how desolate her family life would be, that within a short space of time she would have lost her father (Johnny Cash), her step-mother (June Carter Cash), her mother (Vivian Liberto), as well as her step-sister and aunt. That's a lot of funerals for anyone to have to contend with, not to mention the emotional fallout.
AND YET, A few years later, sitting in the gardens of Dublin's Merrion Hotel on a warm, sunny, life-affirming day last week, Rosanne Cash looks as if the loss that such a series of deaths can claim has dissipated somewhat. She is relaxing after a flight from New York; a friend of hers has recommended afternoon tea at the Merrion as something of a treat, and so Cash is treating herself. She laughs and jokes, her mood is light yet never shallow, and she radiates goodwill and openness.
Residual feelings remain, however - Cash's latest album, Black Cadillac, is, she says, "a concept record that was inspired by loss". The person and the songwriter, she alludes, are indivisible. "It's too much of the fabric of who I am to say that songwriting is just something I do - it's something that I am. What inspires me? Well, loss as I say, but there are many facets to loss - it isn't all just grim and depressing."
Doesn't the creative mind, though, have to dwell more on the dark than the light in order to create the best work? Not all the time, she says. "That subject has been one that has consumed my thoughts for many years. I actually looked for prototypes in art and music of people who didn't have to constantly identify with darkness and negativity, and who didn't self-destruct." She mentions Renoir, but smiles when she realises that further names aren't exactly tripping off her tongue.
"At the same time, I think when you start rummaging through your own psychic contents for inspiration it's not all pretty, but the very fact of bringing it to light, to consciousness, and bringing a sense of poetry to it has a transcendent quality. Because it's truth, or at very least the radiance of truth, and truth is not depressing. Truth has a vibration all of its own."
And if you embrace truth and honesty, then regardless of whether it's painful or not, it's life affirming? "Absolutely. That idea of avoiding darkness because it won't get on the radio makes no sense to me at all. I'd rather find out what the truth is. That's my work ethic, essentially."
What about lighter moments? She writes about those, too, but agrees there isn't much overt humour on Black Cadillac. "I have a well-developed sense of humour," Cash says airily. "I didn't bring a lot of it to Black Cadillac, but that's just this record - there are other records before and will be after." Indeed, Black Cadillac isn't the first time that Cash has corralled her introspection into songs; her bleak 1990 album, Interiors, was appropriately titled, while its 1993 follow-up (The Wheel) captured the despair of the breakdown of her marriage (to country singer Rodney Crowell) in a series of spiky, sorrowful vignettes.
Cash's career, however, has been unfairly, if inevitably, overshadowed by her father. She feels strongly that people who aren't familiar with her career make the mistake of pigeon-holing her as a faded, attempted carbon copy of her father. "I'm a 51-year-old woman, for God's sake, and I've been doing this for almost 30 years, and those comments are irksome. Other mistakes? Well, I consider myself a songwriter first, and perhaps that isn't taken into account as much as it should be, the fact that I've been songwriting for a long time, and that as one I have a lot of discipline.
'IT USED TO bother me more than it does now. You can't get too caught up in the praise or the complaints, or else it just sidetracks you. I have this friend, and he has a saying - 'claim nothing, enjoy life', so I try to let that be my philosophy. If you don't claim or expect anything there is so much freedom. I just do my work, and I have my life. I love my work, I think I'm good at what I do, I love playing music. I have a good life."
She speaks of Johnny Cash sparingly but lovingly. Her perceptions of Ireland, she says, have always been guided by her father's love of the country.
"I feel a particular affinity for the Irish because of Forty Shades of Green," she reveals. "My dad used to tell this great story about the song - several years after he had written it, he was playing in Ireland and he played the song at a festival. And after the show, this old Irish man came up to him and said (Rosanne affects a toe-curling Irish accent) 'aay, 'tis a great old Irish folk song you sang there, Johnny, the Forty Shades of Green'; and my dad said, 'well, no sir, that's a song that I wrote. 'And the old guy said, 'less of that now, Johnny! 'Tis a great old Irish folk song you sang there.' And my dad said, 'Yes, sir.'"
She raises her thumb when asked if she is generally an optimist. That's always been there, she nods. "I'm not one of those that complain and think everything is terrible. I feel very optimistic most of the time. Yes, I have my gloomy moments - that I should think of another career, or that I should perpetually rearrange my kitchen - but I have a great marriage [ to producer John Levanthal], and if I hadn't that then life would be so much harder. The last few years have been particularly hard, and you know what's interesting - through times like those you see who you married. You see who your husband is and who your friends are. In the past few years I really don't think I could have done for him what he did for me. I don't think I'm that unselfish - and I've told him that."
Does she ever wish she had a different surname? Would it have made life easier? "When I was younger I thought if I were going to do music for a living that I should change my name, but I didn't. And a few years into my career, my father wrote me a letter and told me he was so proud that I didn't. It would have hurt him terribly, I'm sure - changing the family name would have been something he wouldn't have understood." She breaks off to look into the garden. "It's interesting - I found that letter about a month ago; I hadn't read it in years. It just broke my heart." Cash is very proud of her lineage, of course. She sees herself as the middle of the story, as there's another generation of musicians coming up - her daughter Chelsea Crowell is a singer - "Which is great, because it's terrible to be the end of the story."
How does she think her daughter will fare? It's going to be tough, she says. "She had a gig the other night and they put 'Chelsea Cash' on the flyers. She called and told me - I felt so sorry for her. She said she wouldn't want her friends to think that she did that; but as soon as she went on stage she rectified it."
For all your experience of your father, his life in music, and what you have been through - what advice would you give your daughter? "Claim nothing, enjoy life! There you go. To be honest, I don't give much unsolicited advice. She asked me about musical advice, and I have given her some about that - notably, that there are two things which separate amateurs from professionals. One is pitch, the other is tempo. You can get away with one, but not both, I told her - unless you're Willie Nelson or Van Morrison!"
Black Cadillac is on the EMI/Capitol label