ISSUE #32 MMUSICMAG.COM ISSUE #32 MMUSICMAG.COM Q&A anything I’ve ever done. “Night School” is married, and I figured they were the fiancées Your integration of pop, rock, the South, not like anything I’ve ever done, nor is “A of these soldiers who never came home. your dad—that’s part of what informs Feather's Not a Bird.” So I picked one of those women, Mary Ann. the song “50,000 Watts.” Rodney happened to be in New York, and he Listening to FM growing up in Southern In what sense? came over and worked on this song with me. California, you would hear Miles Davis The orchestral arrangement of “Night So when we came up with the framework of followed by George Jones. It was so School,” and how melodically different it is the Civil War, I wanted this couple to marry, ecumenical and so incredibly inspirational— from anything I’ve approached before. And and I wanted William to have his bugle in his Santana followed by Merrilee Rush, followed also, the really gritty, swampiness of some hand when he went off to war. Rodney said, by Jefferson Airplane, followed by Bobbie of the songs, which was great. “What if it was his father’s rifle? And what Gentry. It was inspiring! You got this really else would he have in his hand?” And I said, expansive sense of music—there were no How did you work with your husband, “Well, her locket.” One day I was standing in boundaries, no borders, no allegiance John Leventhal? the shower, and I realized William was going to be paid to any one type of genre, that He wrote the music for all the songs. But to die, and that he was from Virginia. That music in itself was a religion, and yet not that’s not how we usually work together. last line came to me: “Oh, Virginia, whence I a dogma. I was imagining not just my dad, Sometimes he wrote the music and I wrote came, I’ll see you when I’m younger / And I'll but all those kids in the South. And even the lyrics. We’ve co-written quite a bit, like know you by your hills again, this time from Ry Cooder—I had a conversation with him “Burn Down This Town” [on Black Cadillac], six feet under.” And I just started weeping. about this, that when he was a kid, the but never an entire album where we wrote all the songs together. That process was the most difficult and rewarding, to keep refining the vision for it. He kept reminding me to put the characters in my songs—like Etta Clay Patrick McBride Clay Patrick Grant in “Etta’s Tune,” and my grandmother in “The Sunken Lands,” and then Robert Johnson and Emmett Till in “Money Road”— and not have it all be a first-person record. The landscape of the South, both physically and soulwise, was heavily peopled. You recorded a gospel song. If we were going to do a record representative of the South, we had to include a gospel song. But neither John nor I are religious. ROSANNEROSANNE CASHCASH Obviously, art and music are deeply spiritual Ross Gilmore/Redferns/Getty Images pursuits, and we have our own concepts HHerer latest album captures the heart and soul of the SSouthouth in song of God. But neither of us is allied with any church or religion. So we were going, THOUGH ROSANNE CASH LEADS A Johnny Cash, once made to further her What was your goal? “But we have to put a gospel song on a richly textured urban life in New York, the musical schooling, Cash wanted to return It feels like, if not a completion, that Southern album!” (laughs) So we wrote “Tell South has always haunted her. Born in to songwriting, but “I didn’t want to just write everything that came before was leading Heaven,” about the longing for connection Memphis but reared in Southern California, a CD of 10 songs off the top of my head.” up to this. I see it as a map of the Southern to something that’s greater than yourself. at 58, she realizes that there is no such thing After beginning to make road trips to soul, my own and others’, but also a real as separating yourself from something that Arkansas to help restore her dad’s boyhood geographical map. How did you choose collaborators? Onstage in Skye, Scotland, 2012 is part of you. From her earliest recordings, home, she realized as the highways flashed We wanted guests who had some she has always been at once part of the by that she needed to map the landscape of Is this a departure for you? connection to the South. [The Civil Wars’] indigenous music of the South—she’s had the South—and its soul—in song. Eventually Yeah, I don’t see the departure so much as I John Paul White and I had become friends, The part about “I’ll see you ‘I see it as a map of the 11 No. 1 country records—and beyond came side trips to artisan textile workers in see the integration. But I know why the press and Joy Williams, too. I just loved his voice, when I’m younger”—only it. Her stunning new set, The River & Florence, Ala., the Dockery Farms Plantation release said that, because The List was and I loved him as a person. He’s a good knowing it as a youth, and Southern soul, my own the Thread, more country than virtually (largely believed to be the birthplace of the more stylized and created with respect to a soul. And he just seemed kind of perfect for never as an old man. It was anything on country radio, finds her plowing Delta Blues) in Cleveland, Ms., and Money, certain tradition. But “departure” meaning, “Etta’s Tune.” just so moving to me. and others’.’ new earth both melodically and thematically. Ms., where the 1955 murder of Emmett Till I guess, going back to the South and really Following the success of 2009’s helped fuel the Civil Rights Movement. “If I embracing that in a whole new way, feeling Tell us about “When the Master Calls Do you think you were meant to write radio was this portal into possibility. Ry The List, a covers collection of classic never make another album,” she says, “I will my heart crack open to the South again. the Roll,” which you wrote with John that song? said to me, he heard “Hey, Porter” on the country drawn from a syllabus her father, be content because I made this one.” And there are songs in there that are unlike and your ex-husband Rodney Crowell. Well, that sounds self-aggrandizing. I think radio, and he thought, “There are people I kept revisiting that song saying, “I really love there are songs that are complete, out in out there like me. I can live in this world.” that melody. Do you think Rodney would be the universe, and you’re really lucky if you And there was real salvation—when your open to different lyrics?” I found a soldier on can get your hands on one—if you’ve gotten life was so hard and you heard this music, ‘If I never make another album I will be content a Civil War database named William Cash. to a place in your songwriting that you can you thought, “This will save me. This is because I made this one.’ I went on Ancestry.com and found all these receive it. We were kind of groping for them, redemption, right here.” women in the right age group who never and we got that one. –Alanna Nash 36 37 M mag 32.indd 36 1/12/14 9:52 PM M mag 32.indd 37 1/12/14 9:52 PM.