Directness drives Cash's 'Black Cadillac'

January 24, 2006|Marc Hirsh, Globe Correspondent

The specter of loss underlying Rosanne Cash's new album, ''Black Cadillac," is hard to ignore, from the title's invocation of a hearse to elegiac songs such as ''I Was Watching You" and ''The World Unseen." Cash is aware that it's a fool's errand to ignore the context in which ''Black Cadillac" was made -- the past 2 1/2 years have seen the deaths of her father, mother, and stepmother -- so she confronts it head-on. The resulting album, in stores today, is probing where it could have been maudlin, delicate where it could have been smothering, and quite possibly her best work since 1990's '' Interiors."

Like that album, ''Black Cadillac" is marked by an unflinching directness. A recent Entertainment Weekly article discussed how, despite the public outpouring of emotion after her father's death and the recent success of the film ''Walk the Line," Cash declined to become involved in the movie's promotion and grieved privately for her father -- John R. rather than Johnny, the music icon. (The album is dedicated to Rosanne's mother, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin; her stepmother, June Carter Cash; as well as her father.) In that respect, it's fitting that there are no featured guests or outside material here. ''Black Cadillac" is all Cash.

The album opens with a snippet of her father urging his little girl to speak, and she finds the words she needs. ''One of us gets to go to heaven / One has to stay here in hell," Cash sings in a hushed murmur over the title track's roiling bass. By the end, organ, electric piano, guitar, and harmonica have erupted into a subtle cacophony that tries to make sense of it all.

She can't, but she comes closest in the gently accepting ''God Is in the Roses," where the lines ''Every drop of rain that falls / Falls for those who mourn / God is in the roses / And the thorns" arrive with a perfect inevitability. Acknowledging her grief but refusing to be overpowered by it, Cash tempers slower songs such as the soft and tender ''Like a Wave" with the ice-water organ and Los Lobos-style stutter-rumble of ''Burn Down This Town" and ''World Without Sound." There, a drunken horn section floats over thudding drums and an insistent, clunking piano until gospel backing vocals and a ringing, Beatles-esque guitar flood the chorus.

Holding ''Black Cadillac" together is Cash's voice, an instrument of almost pure empathy that burrows deep into the heart. It has much the same effect as her father's. It is simply a pleasure to hear and soothingly unchanged but for her added wisdom and maturity. No matter what happens, Rosanne Cash is still Rosanne Cash.