A Conversation with Rosanne Cash – HuffPost 8.10.10

Mike Ragogna: Your new autobiography Composed: A Memoir doesn’t follow the typical, linear format.

Rosanne Cash: It’s not a straight chronology as an autobiography normally would be. It doesn’t start, “I was born on a Tuesday,” blah, blah, blah. I wasn’t really interested in doing that. It’s more circular and themes keep reappearing in my present life that throw me back into the past or the future. It covers, pretty much, my whole life up until 2007 or 2008. But you can’t write a book or a memoir without mentioning your family, so it’s a lot about my childhood and my family. In some ways, the overarching narrative of it is it’s the making of a songwriter, of a writer.

MR: And this is not your first book. Your work Bodies of Water was published back in 1997.

RC: That was my first book, but also I have a little cottage industry of writing essays for various publications. I wrote for The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Oxford American, and many, many others. About 10 years ago, I wrote this essay called “The Ties That Bind” about music and family, and it was chosen for this compilation called Best Music Writing 2000. My editor at Viking read it and said to me, “That’s the beginning of a memoir,” and I said, “Well, I think I’m too young to write a memoir.” He said, “Think about several volumes.” So, I started and it took me a decade, but I finally finished this book.

MR: So, you went to Vanderbilt University and studied under its esteemed English Professor, Walter Sullivan.

RC: Right. He was a wonderful, wonderful man, and was at Vanderbilt for 40 something years. He knew Robert Penn Warren and all of those great literary guys who were around at that time. He kept saying write what you know, write what you know, and he took me seriously even though, at the time, I was a very bad writer. I think it gave me courage.

MR: Speaking of courage, you’ve had some life challenges in the last few years.

RC: Yeah, I have. I guess you are referring to the fact that I had brain surgery in 2007. It was a good hard look at my mortality, which was very motivating.

MR: Like you said before, your approach to writing is not exactly linear, and you have these sweet eulogies towards the end.

RC: Interesting you would bring that up. This was the one thing in the book that I was really ambivalent about including, and I kept saying to my editor even a week before we went to galleys, “Are you sure we should put these in?” They were just so personal and something that I had written in great mourning and delivered privately. He said, “They are beautiful, and I think they belong in there.” So, I went with what he said.

MR: Are there any stories from the book that involve your father Johnny Cash that you feel comfortable sharing in this interview?

RC: Well, I didn’t write about him as this iconic figure, I wrote about him as my father. There is this moment that was kind of revealing of the kind of parent he was which is he never gave advice unless you asked for it. He was very respectful, even to children that way. I wanted to go off and live in London when I was 20 years old, so he kind of underwrote the whole experience and paid for the rent and paid for me to go. He never interfered. So, I just did this and learned so much, and it was a real coming-of-age experience for me. But I came back for a visit six months later and he said, “Okay, that’s it. You have to come home now.” I asked why, and he said, “You have to come home now.” It wasn’t until much later when he told me that he was so afraid that I would loose touch with my family forever and become an expatriate and never return to the family fold. He reinserted his parenting right then. It was a very loving thing to do because he was right. I would have probably separated myself.

MR: This book is clearly the journey of Rosanne Cash, not a back door glimpse into the life of Johnny Cash. Others in your position might not have been so elegant.

RC: Yeah, of course, how can you write a memoir about another person? I mean, I’m sure you can, but I just couldn’t do that. As most people you know, I am mostly absorbed in my own life. My insights have been about my own character and my own experiences. You know, I have had a lot of unusual experiences in my life. But the way I’ve experienced them has not been unusual. There are these stories of coming-of-age, loss, crises of faith, travel, motherhood, serious health crises, you know. These are very universal experiences.

MR: And I believe that Rosanne Cash fans feel a deep connection with you because you’ve been such a real person to them.

RC: Well, I would hope so, and that’s a great compliment if it’s true. I do find–and it’s kind of cliché–that the more personal, universal…there was this record I did, Black Cadillac, that was about loss. Several members of my family died in a short period of time, and I wrote this record that was kind of a map of grieving. It wasn’t just sad, as there are a lot of elements to losing people; you get angry, you get liberated. There are crises of all kinds. These songs had a lot of documentary detail to them, and I got nervous about that. It seemed too revealing, and the path that I had always used was poetic license in songwriting. But there is this one song that was particularly full of documentary-type details called “House On the Lake.” The first time I performed it, I was so nervous that I was revealing too much, and a guy came up to me afterward and said, “You know, everybody’s got their house on the lake.” Then I thought, “Okay, I’m over the hump.”

MR: “Black Cadillac” was a very personal, almost mournful song.

RC: It’s fair to say mournful. It’s just that mourning isn’t just one single thing. People think mourning is sad. Well, it’s more than just sad, it’s a lot of things. And it’s also reestablishing relationships with the people that died because I found that they do go on. With your parents, you are free to relate to the best parts of them which is nice. Yeah, that record “Black Cadillac” was probably the most personal I’ve done.

MR: Is it fair to say that a lot of your fans came in on the single “Seven Year Ache”?

RC: That’s true, yes. “Seven Year Ache” was a very successful and popular record. Do you know that was 30 years ago? It’s hard for me to believe, but it’s about the age my youngest daughter is now when I wrote and recorded that record.

MR: You have also recorded John Hiatt’s music over the years.

RC: Yes, I love John Hiatt. I really resonate with his writing. I am a huge fan of his, and I have always felt comfortable interpreting his songs. I can’t say that about everybody. I was very selective as an interpreter as I preferred being a songwriter myself. John was always one I was drawn too.

MR: Can you talk about The List for a moment because it was such an important album to so many people?

RC: Sure. I went on the road with my Dad when I was 18, and I was a huge Beatles fan. I grew up in Southern California infused with the pop and rock of the ’60s and early ’70s. So, after High School, I went on the road with my Dad, and we were talking about songs. He mentioned a song and I said, “I don’t know that one.” He mentioned another, and I said, “I don’t know that one either, Dad,” and he grew very alarmed. He thought I was missing half of the knowledge I needed. He knew I wanted to be a songwriter, and so he spent the afternoon making this list of songs, and at the end, he said, “This is your education.” It wasan education, my God. It’s a great archive for me now.

MR: The songs on that album are so wonderful. My personal favorites are “Motherless Children,” Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country,” and the Hank Snow number “I’m Moving On.”

RC: Yeah, those are just great American songs. It’s such a rich treasure trove of who we are as Americans, as Appalachian music, early country music, Delta blues, Southern Gospel, folk songs. You know, my dad recorded “Girl From the North Country” with Dylan in 1969. To think about doing it, I had this iconic version in my head that I had to get away from. So, we listened to Bob’s original version from 1963, and it’s very much like an old Elizabethan folk song. It’s just such a beautiful part of the canon.

MR: In 2007, Michael Streissguth wrote Always Been There: Rosanne Cash, The List, and the Spirit of Southern Music.

RC: Right. He followed me around for a few months and came to the studio when we were recording The List. He wrote this book about my Dad, and did this film on Folsom, and he was so intrigued by this list and this idea of musical legacy which has kind of consumed me as well, stepping into this musical legacy.

MR: At times, it seemed almost as if it were your voice and perspective.

RC: Yeah, although the way he wrote about the recording process, I don’t know that I would have documented it like that or that I could. Having his objective observation was a nice thing to have for that book.

MR: When I’m interviewing an artist with a new album, I sometimes ask which songs are personal favorites. Do you have a favorite chapter in this book?

RC: That is a hard one. There are certain scenes and stories that I think are really good and rich in detail. There is a certain story I told about Oslo Prison. I went to Oslo, Norway, shortly after my Dad died, and there were these Norwegian artists who did a concert in Oslo Prison of my Dad’s music as a kind of tribute to him. He had just died three months before. They invited me to come to Oslo to see this concert, and it was one of the most moving events of my life. So, I wrote about the concert in Oslo, yet somehow, I didn’t know that it was going to connect this scene that occurs about three years before my Dad died, when I took him to a hardware store. As I said, there is this sense of themes reappearing and time being mutable that shows up, and in that piece in a really clear and lovely way, I think.

MR: I have to be a fan now and tell you how much I loved your album The Wheel.

RC: The Wheel is the record I made with my husband, and that’s the record we fell in love to when making it. So, that has a special place in my heart too.

MR: Will we be hearing any new music from you soon?

RC: You will. That is something I am going to start wrapping my head around in the fall.

MR: Is there anything in the paper right now that’s interesting you?

RC: I’ve been following the spill in the Gulf pretty closely. It’s very troubling. I follow the Tea Party machinations with great fear and trepidation.

MR: What do you think of the whole Sarah Palin thing?

RC: Actually, I wrote a piece and The Huffington Post published it called “Why I Would Be A Better Vice President Than Sarah Palin.” It was very snarky and kind of funny; but the truth is, I am just appalled that we don’t want the smartest people in the room to be the leaders of our country. It makes no sense to me.

MR: If you were to give advice to new artists, what would that be?

RC: Learn an instrument. So many don’t play instruments these days. Also, it’s something I say in the book–refine your skills to support your instincts. Sometimes, we have these instincts and passions towards doing something really creative, but if you don’t have the skill set to support it, it’s just kind of wasted. I’m one of those who thinks it’s half inspiration, half perspiration. So, I would say keep your head down and work hard.

Transcribed by Erika Richards