100 Highways on the Fourth of July

I’m sitting on the sofa before sunrise on the Fourth of July, listening to the new Johnny Cash album on the iPod my Missus got me for Christmas with my son on my lap spellbound by “The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T” on TCM.

Johnny Cash, The Man Cub and Dr. Seuss. I think I’m finally figuring out how to do holidays right. I’ll leave my anthropological dissection of “The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T” for another day and focus today’s remarks on the music.

“100 Highways” is the strongest Johnny Cash album in ten years. There’s not a clunker included in the dozen tracks here, a welcome respite from the last couple of releases.

Pensive, lush and ultimately upbeat, Cash works the same themes he’s been exploring for years — decades, really. Since Day One, his songs have been about love, God and death and these are no exception. But as his earthly termination approached, Cash turned a more interested eye to that last one, death; particularly his own. His characters changed from the perspective of the man who shot the fella in Reno, to that fellow from Reno himself.

The album opens with a spare rendition of Larry Gatlin’s “Help Me,” and finds Cash in full possession of his instrument. The first words sung are:
Oh Lord, help me to walk another mile, just one mile
I’m tired of walkin’ all alone

Even more than the rest of the American Recordings canon (with the exception of “My Mother’s Hymnbook,” released as part of an anthology shortly after Cash died), “100 Highways” is explicitly a rumination on mortality. I think producer Rick Rubin, with whom Cash worked closely on the series of albums, probably chose to include the Springsteen song on the disc, “Further On Up The Road,” just for its sinister boneyard imagery:
Got on my dead man's suit and my smilin' skull ring
My lucky graveyard boots and song to sing

Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind” finds Cash at his most frail, vocally. The Voice is practically falling apart at the seams, and it lends his reading of this tune a wrenching gravity. Occasionally when Cash covered really well-known recordings — like “Cats In The Cradle” or U2’s “One” — his interpretation suffered by comparison. This is a proper re-invention, however, and stands on its two feet. Or rocks back and forth in its own creaky chair... It’s magnificent.

“The Evening Train” may be the most straightforward train-as-metaphor-for-death song ever composed (and Cash has sang all of them and written more than a few himself), and another story about losing one’s wife. Where Cash’s characters used to be more removed from the man himself, as he grew older they became more and more nakedly autobiographical. This is a man who looked death in the face, and said, “Let me get my bags!”

“Like the 309,” allegedly Cash’s final composition, is a cheerful ditty about looking forward to one’s own funeral that you can line-dance to. Bouncy and full of mordant humor and cracker wisdom, the vocal is eerily threadbare enough to return the listener’s attention to the actual words being sung:
Take me to the depot, put me to bed
Blow an electric fan on my gnarly old head
Everybody take a look see I’m doin’ fine
Then load my box on the 309

Thematically, things perk up a little in the middle of the disc. The CD’s title comes from a line in “Love’s Been Good to Me,” a song credited to Frank Sinatra (!), that anchors the disc. Cash’s performance is obviously about June, and when he intones “love’s been good to me” at the end, as usual when Johnny Cash says a thing, you don’t doubt it for a minute.

“Legend In My Time” is also given the tongue-in-cheek treatment, including the Hank Williams-esque speak-sing of the second verse.

“Rose of My Heart” is another straight-ahead love ballad. A light-heartedness in the delivery – and its use of the present tense – makes me think he probably recorded it before June died rather than after.

But as the CD winds down, so does Cash. The penultimate song, “Four Strong Winds,” finds The Man In Black again almost whispering lyrics like:
Four strong winds that blow lonely
Seven seas that run high
All these things that don’t change come what may
Now our good times are all gone
And I’m bound for movin’ on
I’ll look for you if I’m ever back this way

One last time, Cash is looking at his own mortality and telling us, “I’m not afraid, don’t you be either.”

A favorite Bible verse of Cash’s — and one he quoted often — was Matthew 14:27, “But straightway Jesus spake unto them, saying Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid.” Cash was looking forward to hearing those words of comfort from The Man’s own lips, and in his heart as well as his art, he was getting ready to.

That he wasn’t afraid is what makes the disc an ultimately rewarding, uplifting affair. Cash’s Christian faith was so deeply a part of him that death literally held no fear for him. You listen to the songs, and you don’t even feel sad for the guy.

And for the religious skeptics among us, Rubin promises a sixth and final disc, perhaps as early as next year, and promises it’ll be a more upbeat affair for everybody. Even us skeptics.

UPDATE: Don’t know how long USA Today will keep it up, but right now there’s a very cool and beautiful interview with Rick Rubin up on their site. You should check it out.