After all the albums and honors, Rosanne Cash has ‘things I still want to accomplish’

Hours away from receiving the American Eagle Award from the National Music Council of the United States, Rosanne Cash is looking for composure. “I’m trying not to let it rattle me,” she says with a laugh.

High profile accolades are nothing new to the acclaimed songwriter. Over a near-half century career, she has won four Grammys (all in different categories), the Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contributions to American culture and arts (which places her in the company of such giants as Georgia O’Keefe, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein) and has been honored as one of the few women elected to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

The Eagle Award, though, is rattling Cash for all the right reasons. It will be presented to her by another esteemed songsmith, Jackson Browne. It’s a fitting bit of torch-passing, too. A decade ago, Cash served as presenter of the same award to Kris Kristofferson.

Heavy honors, heavy names — all allies in a career than seen Cash mature from a budding country music stylist situated unavoidably in the shadow of her legendary father into a composer and artist whose work — rich in its distinctive and very literary senses of personal, familial and social reflection — shows no signs of creatively abating.

“I feel the urgency of age, which is both unsettling and really motivating,” said Cash, who will turn 70 in May. “Maybe you know what I’m talking about. There are things I still want to accomplish, things I want to write, things I want to see, things I want to sing before my voice falls apart. Every day I wake up with the urgency to get it done.”

Rosanne Cash’s albums new and old

Representing that voice as new music is being recorded (her next album, she said, is halfway complete) is a two-disc, career-spanning compilation titled simply “The Essential Collection.” Far from the usual record contract fulfillment project many anthologies serve as, Cash oversaw the work and released it last fall on RumbleStrip Records, the label she operates with husband and longtime artistic partner John Leventhal. Such an undertaking meant leaping through numerous legal hurdles, as clearances for “The Essential Collection” had to be obtained from the labels her original recordings were released on.

“It was complicated,” she said with a slight laugh. “Not for me, but for my lawyers.”

Discussing the music gathered on “The Essential Collection” helps provide focus to the growth and artistic width of Cash’s career. Its music is presented chronologically in terms of eras, but not in the actual order the songs were recorded.

The introductory selections, for instance, revolve around music made by a young country artist gradually gaining acceptance from radio, industry, critics and audiences. The set opens with “Seven Year Ache,” the infectious title tune from Cash’s 1981 recording of the same name — the second of six albums produced by fellow country artisan and then-husband Rodney Crowell.

“It was a different part of my life,” Cash said of the surroundings of her early music. “It’s like looking at something my daughter did. It was that long ago, but I don’t discount or deflect anything I did there. It’s kind of more precious to me because it seems innocent. I was just learning and getting my feet on the ground, as any person in their early 20s was doing. I was learning how to make records, learning how to sing, the whole thing, so I have a tenderness when I look at those really early records. But, yeah, it is a different me.”

The first disc of “The Essential Collection” then journeys into three late ’80s and early ’90s albums that take Cash beyond country terrain (1985’s “King’s Record Shop”) into more genre-free reflection heavily influenced by her eventual divorce from Crowell (1990’s “Interiors”) and subsequent personal renewal (1993’s “The Wheel.”)

“When you say those three records, I can see them representing different times in my life. ‘King’s Record Shop’ was the height of whatever height I achieved in terms of commercial country success. I ended up being kind of unhappy because I wasn’t writing as much as I wanted to and I wasn’t as devoted to writing as I wanted to be. That was only my fault. Nobody was stopping me. Then my marriage to Rodney started crumbling as I was writing songs for ‘Interiors.’ I went to a dark place. It was kind of an excavation of ‘who am I’ and ‘what do I want to do,’ but being true to myself. So ‘Interiors’ was really a door into a whole other way of being, a more truthful way of being, but it was prompted by a lot of pain and destruction. And then ‘The Wheel’ — rebirth.”

Father Johnny Cash’s shadow

As “The Essential Collection” take us to the 2000s, Cash addresses the inspiration that towered over her and generations of fellow artists — Johnny Cash. But her investment has been, needless to say, considerably more rooted as Cash was her father as well as one of the biggest champions of her music. The 2006 album “Black Cadillac” is dedicated to both of her parents — the elder Cash and mother Vivian Liberto while 2009’s “The List” is a sampler based on a register of folk, country and Americana songs Johnny Cash encouraged his eldest daughter to learn as a teenager to broaden a budding musical vocabulary.

“It’s difficult for a young person who goes into the same field as a very successful parent to find themselves. That’s just kind of baseline. My father cast an enormous shadow, an iconic image people project a lot of their dreams and wishes onto. When somebody kind of moves out of the realm of just a human being into a screen for people to project on, it becomes even more difficult.

“So bearing down, getting rid of all that and just accepting and treasuring who he was, not just as my dad, but the legacy that he gave me, his instincts as an artist and his music. ... I think all that is assimilated pretty well at this point, but it’s probably a lifetime experience. There’s been a lot of push-pull over the years as I got rid of my need to push away and graciously integrate what was mine without feeling like it was going to suffocate what was me but what was not him.”

The anthology concludes with songs deep in geographic and personal introspection from two of Cash’s newest (and finest) albums — 2014’s “The River and the Thread” and 2018’s “She Remembers Everything.” The most recent entry on “The Essential Collection,” a stand-along single from 2021 titled “The Killing Fields,” mirrors the racially fueled protests of the time with the atrocities of lynchings that blighted the South generations earlier.

“The song is specific and it’s very dark,” Cash said. “It was written after the protests of that summer when a lot of white people had the veil lifted just a bit as to how we look at the world through a prism of our own entitlement. I started thinking about the history of lynchings in the South — in Arkansas, in particular, because that’s where my dad’s side of the family came from. I was starting in the present, going deep into a dark past and then coming back out into the present saying, ‘That’s not who we are now.’”

These narratives and musical reflections will be re-explored in a performance this weekend at the Norton Center for the Arts in Danville. Cash’s lone bandmate for the concert: Her primary producer, songwriting collaborator, guitarist and husband of 30 years, John Leventhal.

“John is one of the most gifted musicians I’ve ever known in my life, and I don’t just mean by the way he plays, but by the arrangements he hears in his head, the harmonics he’s drawn to. There are voicings and progressions he understands deeply. He knows as much about, say, Barber and Prokofiev as he does about The Beatles. He’s a musicologist, so his gifts and his deep musicality have taught me a lot. He’s also really damn opinionated. He pushes me a lot. There is a lot of arguing that goes on because I may not have his musical vocabulary, but I’m just as opinionated. He’s really challenged me to be better, go deeper and get more refined.

“Anyway, it’s a love relationship — musically and in every other way. It can be complicated, but we love being together. We’re kind of not modern in that we don’t spend a lot of time apart. We’re together all the time — except, of course, when I go to Paris for a couple of weeks with my girlfriends to get away from him.”

Rosanne Cash and John Leventhal

When: Feb. 15, 7:30 p.m.

Where: Newlin Hall of the Norton Center for the Arts, 600 W. Walnut in Danville

Tickets: $46-$105

This story was originally published February 11, 2025 at 6:30 AM.