Before I ever heard a Rosanne Cash song, I was a fan of her writing. I had a received a grant to write a book of poems and was looking for a mentor. I found her book of short stories called Bodies of Water and understood, after reading it, the importance of furniture. I took note in my journal: “To believe the psychology of the characters you first have to smell the sea, see the creatures in the field.” Then I went out and bought her latest album.
In her column for the New York Times titled In the Ear of the Beholder, Cash gives her take on Truth: “Physical material, real-world artifacts carry poetic weight and should be used liberally in songwriting. These are the facts that convey truth to me.” In Composed, she shares her truth, her life, by giving us all the details – not the petty or prurient stuff of tabloid dreams, but rather, the people, places and things that serve as numen, talismans or nemeses, that keep cropping up in an unfolding life-story, among them: rattlesnakes , a circus tent, a lonely road, a least-favourite toe, “folk singers, addicts, preachers and the occasional sex kitten” knocking on the door of her childhood home in the middle of the night “looking for Johnny Cash.”
Composed, by Rosanne Cash, Viking, 253 pages, $33.50
Earlier this year I had the opportunity to interview Rosanne Cash for a documentary. We talked about her passion for writing, her recent brain surgery, her reticence to be a public person and, eventually, I got up the courage to ask her if her choice of Composed for the title of her autobiography could also be a reflection of a learned behaviour adapted after years of enduring so many stupid questions about her dad. Her response: “Madonna, you have no idea!”
The moment Rosanne Cash graduates from high school, her father takes her on the road with him. For two and half years she travels the world, learning early and firsthand the downside of the performer’s life: “the bone-crushing exhaustion, the constant vulnerability to media misinterpretation or even slander, and the complete obliteration of any semblance of private life.”
Self-expression without craft is for toddlers — Rosanne Cash
Conflicted with a need to get out of her father’s shadow and her passion for songwriting, she strikes out for new territory, hoping to find herself in other, less public art forms. She studies literature at Vanderbilt, then acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in LA. Still the songs chase her. While working in London she finds herself having a drink at the Hard Rock Café. Bruce Springsteen comes on the sound system. “The combination of urgency, poetry, testosterone-fuelled guitars and the relentless backbeat” makes her weak at the knees. “It was as if William Blake had put on black leather and climbed a motorcycle.”
Eventually Cash answers to her own sense of urgency and poetry. She steps into her “family’s vocation.” She starts writing songs and eventually recording. Her fellow musicians give her their unique sounds, support and advice, including: “Perform to the six per cent of the audience who are poets” and “Don’t stop working, just stop worrying.” When doubt periodically resurfaces, she beats it back with discipline and dedication to craft. “Work,” she reminds herself, “is redemption.” And “self-expression without craft,” she warns the artists among us, “is for toddlers.”
