By DEBORAH SOLOMON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
October 4, 2009
Photo: Christian Oth for The New York Times
On Tuesday, you’re releasing your 14th album, “The List,” a stirring leap into the past whose title refers to an actual list of 100 mostly country songs compiled by your father, Johnny Cash, in 1973 in an effort to expand your teenage taste in music beyond the Beatles. He realized that I lacked something essential about my own musical genealogy, and he made this list for me. He said, “This is a template for excellence.” He would play the songs for me on his guitar, and I sought out the records in the years afterward.
Did you have a good relationship with him? It’s hard to be close to a drug addict when they’re active. He was erratic and withdrawn. But when I was 17, he said, Come with me, and I left the day after I graduated high school, went on the road with him. It was wonderful. He was clean and sober by that time. That’s when he wrote the list for me, on the bus.
As an acclaimed songwriter who is just releasing your first album composed entirely of other peoples’ songs, do you think “The List” will bring new life to old classics and raise the country-music consciousness of a generation of kids? Not just young people. I have a 50-year-old, culturally astute girlfriend who heard a recording of “Sea of Heartbreak” and said, Did you write that? I said, Hardly. Not even close. The definitive version was recorded by Don Gibson in 1961.
My favorite song on the album is “Heartaches by the Number,” which you perform with Elvis Costello. You also sing duets with Bruce Springsteen, Jeff Tweedy and Rufus Wainwright. Don’t you know any female performers? I did ask Neko Case, and she sang with me on a song that’s just on iTunes. We have “Satisfied Mind.”
You were born in Memphis but grew up in California. People have this impression that I grew up on a hay bale in the South. But I was steeped in Southern California pop and rock. I was president of my Beatles fan club when I was 11 and living in Ventura.
What led you to settle in Manhattan? You know that saying “We always thought she was kind of weird, but it turns out she’s just a New Yorker.”
Your husband, the composer John Leventhal, produced your new album and accompanies you on guitar and keyboards. He also wrote the arrangements, which is very old school; a lot of times in modern recordings people just bash things out. John is the opposite of me, solid and practical, a good Jewish husband. He helped me become more earthbound. I was always dreamy, thinking about art and not knowing where to buy stamps. I have a terror of running out of stamps.
You don’t need to worry about stamps anymore in the age of e-mail. I send letters. I always write a letter if somebody dies, if somebody loses somebody.
That’s admirable. One of my great regrets is that I haven’t written more sympathy letters. I have regrets. I don’t understand people who say they don’t have any regrets. I regret not asking my dad what the songs of the list would be from 1973 to 2003. I regret not asking him to expand the list.
Two years ago, you underwent brain surgery, for a structural abnormality. Brain surgery is not for sissies, in case you were wondering. I had 19 staples up the back of my head. My morbid sense of humor really got me through it. I went to the hospital singing, “If I only had a brain.”
We should mention you’re the mother of five children, the youngest of whom is 10. I could just eat him for breakfast. He’s so great. I can’t tell you how many Lego embedded in my feet with this child. I’m walking through the living room with Lego everywhere.
You’re pretty cheerful for someone whose new album takes us into “this sea of tears, sea of heartbreak.” Cheerfulness is a choice, and I realized at some point that I didn’t want to become a bitter old woman.
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