Roseanne Cash

Where music, the soul and love survive

The Observer, February 2006

Precisely four-and-a-half hours after a film about her father, mother and stepmother was nominated for five Oscars, Rosanne Cash walks into the Nicole Farhi store near her home in Chelsea, New York City, and orders chicken soup and cornbread at the adjoining cafe. She is wearing a green velvet hat, which she keeps on for the duration of her lunch, and a thick dark coat which she discards. She comments on the cold as she eyes a black leather jacket on one of the racks.

She is here to talk about her new record, Black Cadillac, which is as close as she has ever got to a concept album in her 32-year songwriting career. The concept is grief and its attendant terrain of memory and love. In the last 30 months, she has lost her father, mother, stepmother, stepsister and an aunt, and the album has been an attempt to interpret her bereavements in lyrical terms. It is a wonderful record, possibly the best she has ever made.

Unfortunately for her, it has been overshadowed by another cultural event. Rosanne Cash doesn’t much like the portrayal of her mother in Walk the Line, the new biopic with acclaimed performances from Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon. But then she doesn’t much like the film at all. She saw a rough edit with her 17-year-old daughter in the summer. ‘It was like having a root canal without anaesthetic,’ she says. ‘My manager was saying, “You really ought to see it so that you can talk about it intelligently.” And my brother was one of the executive producers and he really wanted me to see it. He had been instrumental in having them remove a couple of scenes that were not very flattering to my mother.’

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