For decades, Rosanne Cash has soared through the ranks of music with her powerhouse poetic skills and wistful reflections on her past. She has released 15 albums, won four Grammys, and authored four books, including a best-selling memoir. She joins to talk about her life and legendary career as a singer, songwriter, and author.
Debbie Millman:
Country folk, pop, blues, Americana. Call it what you will, and you still won’t capture the moving, memorable music of Rosanne Cash. One of the country’s preeminent singer-songwriters, Rosanne Cash has released 15 albums that have earned four Grammy Awards and 12 additional nominations. Rosanne is also an author of four books, including the best-selling memoir, Composed, which the Chicago Tribune called one of the best accounts of an American life you’ll likely ever read. She’s one of only a handful of women to be elected to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. And in 2021, Rosanne was the first female composer to receive the McDowell Medal awarded to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to American culture. She joins me today to talk about her music, her writing, her 45-year career and the 30th anniversary re-release of her album, The Wheel. Rosanne Cash, welcome to Design Matters.
Rosanne Cash:
Hi Debbie. Thank you for having me.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. Rosanne, is it true that at one point growing up you had a pet monkey?
Rosanne Cash:
I didn’t have a pet monkey and my mother did, and I don’t know what she was thinking and it still creeps me out that she did.
Debbie Millman:
So it was yours by proxy then?
Rosanne Cash:
Well, no, not even. I kept my distance. That is the first time anyone has ever asked me that question, so kudos.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Thank you. You were born in Memphis, Tennessee.
Rosanne Cash:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
But you and your three sisters moved to Encino, California after your parents bought Johnny Carson’s house on Havenhurst Avenue when you were three years old. Do you have any memory of what that house was like?
Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, we bought Johnny Carson’s house. My mother always told this story, I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not, that Mrs. Carson left a pie in the oven. It’s possible.
Debbie Millman:
Wow.
Rosanne Cash:
Possibly true. I do remember the house. I remember one day coming into the living room and seeing a film crew in our house. There was this show called Here’s Hollywood, and they had come to interview my dad, my mom, and at home, come see how he lives at home, and I remember how much I resented having this television crew in our house and thus began a lifelong suspicion of journalists.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, that’s not where I thought you were going to go with that.
Rosanne Cash:
The press company accepted.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Thank you. Well, I know it also made you skeptical of fame and the lack of privacy that it really caused your family, especially your mother.
Rosanne Cash:
Well, that’s true, and that’s really the takeaway from that story about the television crew is that I just hated the intrusion. I hated opening our private life and so did my mother. My mother was incredibly private and I had no illusions about fame that I knew it wasn’t glamorous, that it didn’t make you happy, that it didn’t fulfill all your needs as a human being, and it was bone crushing work. I saw my dad beyond exhausted. And yeah, so I’ve always had a very real understanding of what fame means and how destructive it could be.
Debbie Millman:
In your beautiful memoir, Composed, you described your earliest memory and you wrote this, “My earliest memory, perhaps the earliest possible flawed template for my life dates to when I was around two years old, we were visiting my mother’s parents in San Antonio and my grandfather, Tom, the bespeckled insurance agent, master amateur magician, renowned rose breeder and champion gin rummy player, took me to the park to feed the pigeons. He was sitting on a green bench tossing seeds from a bag to the birds, which were flocking around his feet. He kept saying, ‘Look at the birds Rosanne,’ and I thought to myself with a sharp clarity that I now spend most of my waking hours trying to recapture, ‘Oh, am I supposed to pretend to be excited? I’m supposed to act like a child.’ And so I did. I squealed the obligingly feigned alarm at the gathering birds and pleased my grandfather. It was a bad way to start things off, actually a compelling need to please people can be deadly.” That paragraph says so much about who you were, who you are. Have you gotten better with the compulsion to be a people pleaser?
Rosanne Cash:
Oh my God, yeah. That’s one of the beauties of age, isn’t it? You just don’t give a what people think of you at some point. There’s an urgency that goes along with aging that you have more to say, less time to say it and trying to please people by your work or the way you live or the way you speak or who you are, how you look, what shoes you wear, what songs you sing, that all of that is distraction from the real work and the truth of being that you have little time left to live and be, and I am aware of that every day now. It moves me to tears to think about it, the sense of urgency that overcomes me sometimes. Bob Dylan said it about performing that people-pleasing was death for an artist. You get outside yourself, you get self-conscious. You try to moderate or twist or define or truncate who you are and what you do, and then the world doesn’t have you.
Debbie Millman:
I was really struck in your early years how much you needed to be the adult. One of the things that really struck me was the creation of imaginary friends that you… A lot of children have imaginary friends. I had one named Goonie, but she was a little girl like me, and I insisted that she have a table setting at the kitchen table and so forth, but yours were adults, which is really, really unusual and I’m wondering if you can talk about what kind of imaginary adult friends you made at the time.
Rosanne Cash:
I’ve wondered about that too why my imaginary friends were adults, and I’ve talked about this with various therapists over the years, and I think it’s because there was a lot of chaos in my life and in my parents’ marriage and my dad on the road and using drugs, and my mother just beside herself with fear and grief and worry and anxiety and anger, and I did a really smart thing. I created adults who were perfect, who saw who I was and loved me as I was and were protective. One of them I still have with me.
Debbie Millman:
Really?
Rosanne Cash:
I still talk to her once in a while.
Debbie Millman:
I’m going to not ask you about her only because I know that you’ve been reticent about talking to them at all, talking about them at all rather.
Rosanne Cash:
I have. I have. I don’t tell people their names. I don’t like talking about them.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. I totally respect that. You ended up at that time needing to be more of an adult in your family. You were the person your three sisters turned to in times of trouble, ultimately became the child who had to pretend not to be a child. So much so that you began to hate the very word child. And I also was struck by the fact that you never cried, a fact at the time that you took great pride in. How did you manage through this time?
Rosanne Cash:
So my mom was not fully present. My mom had some really wonderful qualities. I learned discipline from her, her domestic skills and arts were so refined and beautiful, president of her garden club, dozens and dozens of close friends. But during that time when I was young and my dad was on the road and their marriage was falling apart, my mom was out of her mind, out of her body and often literally hysterical. And I had three younger sisters and I took it upon myself to be an adult. And if my mom was taking up all the emotional space, there wasn’t much room for me to do it.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Rosanne Cash:
I think that that’s maybe a common thing for children who have a parent who’s off the rails. And my other parent was, at that time was a drug addict and he was gone a lot. So my family is well known, but it’s not that different from other families who the addiction is the hub of the wheel.
Debbie Millman:
Did you know your dad was a drug addict at that time? You were so young.
Rosanne Cash:
Oh my God, no, no. People didn’t talk to children about that. I don’t even think my mother understood it. There just wasn’t the consciousness about it as there is today.
Debbie Millman:
I want to read another short excerpt from another book that you wrote, your book, Bodies of Water, and you say this about your childhood. “The summer I turned 11, I felt too big for my body, too small for my heart, confused by the secrets and fears that permeated the very atoms of the air inside my home, and far too old from my age.” You go on to write, “When I was 11, I stopped dreaming the dreams that didn’t come true, I stopped talking to people who didn’t listen. I lost hope and retreated. I assumed that the root of the problem was that I was too strange for the real world. That being the case, I created a charming and dynamic personality to make the necessary forays into the outside, and I kept my strangeness for myself, my own particular jewels under lock and key.”
Rosanne Cash:
I forgot I wrote that.
Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I was really struck by in reading that was the notion that your strange self needed to be protected. And in some ways that gave me a lot of hope in thinking about who you became, that you didn’t disappear that person, you just hid her under lock and key.
Rosanne Cash:
Definitely. And she’s the one who’s the artist and needs protection. And as I felt safer as I grew older then she’s the source of creativity.
Debbie Millman:
I love that you referred to this strange part of yourself as jewels.
Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, yeah. I had this image of myself, that strange little self in, she had a secret cave and in the cave where all the records she wanted and all the books and access to all of these wonderful things, and it was private and I could lock myself away and nobody could say a thing to me. Sometimes I still wish I had that space to go to. Well, I do in my mind, because that’s only place it ever was.
Debbie Millman:
I’m glad you protected it.
Rosanne Cash:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
When you were 12 years old, your parents split up and your dad moved to Tennessee. You and the rest of the family moved to Ventura to a house you’ve described as a sixties fantasy come to life. And you said that that, with that move, someone opened up all the windows and let the air and light inside your life. For most children, young people, divorce is really quite traumatic. It seemed like that began a part of your life that actually improved.
Rosanne Cash:
Well, it did. We had been living on the top of this mountain top alone, no children around, nothing around except dry brush canyons and rattlesnakes, and it was very solitary. It was the worst part of my mom’s life and the worst part of her craziness. And I think the divorce, I remember thinking maybe now both of them can be happy. It was a relief. It’s like, somewhere I knew this was not going to work and they had destinies elsewhere separate from each other. And so moving to near the ocean, which the ocean is like a religion to me, so moving near the ocean, my dad cleans up. They both have new partners. I was then on the verge of being a teenager and was discovering so much music and poetry and books, all of those things I love so much. So yeah, it was like the light came in. It was fantastic.
Debbie Millman:
You went to high school at St. Bonaventure in Ventura and wore your Catholic uniform very short, which I love you, and a small group of classmates who were a little left of center called yourselves, the Anarchy Society. And at that point you thought you’d become a poet. What kind of poetry were you writing?
Rosanne Cash:
Oh my God, Debbie so bad. Just beyond, it should be burned in a bonfire with rituals so that nothing ever comes back from it. It was just terrible. But at one point, this is so odd, but I got a letter from this woman a few years ago and she said, “I was your babysitter when your mom went out of town and you were in your young teens.” And she said, “And you asked me, how do you put poems to music?” And I thought to myself, why in the hell would I ask a random babysitter when I had a great songwriter as a parent? But I remember I read a lot of poetry then, I wrote poetry, and then in my late teens I learned to play guitar and I started putting it together.
Debbie Millman:
At the time you also considered becoming an archaeologist or going to medical school, and I know you’ve had a lifelong interest in science and physics, but what compelled you to think about archaeology or medicine?
Rosanne Cash:
Well, I love science. I love thinking about what neurons do and the plasticity of the brain and all of that, and I love history so much, and I thought, Oh God, it would be so great to live in a kibbutz and dig up ancient artifacts. And I actually took a summer course in anthropology at the local college, and I’m still really interested in history and science. It’s source of great curiosity and actually quantum physics as well now. The poetry in theoretical physics is so beautiful, dark matter, the event horizon, mutual attraction.
Debbie Millman:
Quantum entanglement.
Rosanne Cash:
Entanglement. Oh my God, it’s so beautiful.
Debbie Millman:
I want to talk to you about dreams. Over the course of your life you’ve had a number of significant dreams that you’ve written about. You also shared that Carl Jung had stated that a person might have five big dreams in their lives, and that dreams that provoke a shift in real consciousness. And I believe your first one occurred when you were 13 where you were playing cards with your mother and your grandmother in a small house. You were old in the dream and aware that your life was nearly over. Can you talk about that dream and how it impacted you and your thinking about yourself at that time?
Rosanne Cash:
It was so profound to me, an experience that it seems reductive to even call it a dream, but I was asleep and this vision came that I was old as you said, and that I was at the end of my life and I was playing cards with my mother and grandmother, and we were just mechanically putting the cards down on the table, and I realized that I had done that my whole life, just putting the cards down one after the other, and we weren’t really speaking. There was no connection, just playing the cards. And I woke up in a sweat and it frightened me so badly and I realized that you had to make a choice to be awake in your life. And that kind of inertia and lack of awareness could creep upon you without you knowing it.
And I made this vow to myself in the bed as I woke up, I said, I will never be a card player. And I’ve referred to that dream in myself, thought of it so many times over the decades, and I even started once writing a story called “The Card Players” about it. Yeah, it’s been a guiding light that dream. If Carl Jung is right and you have five big dreams, that was my first one.
Debbie Millman:
I want to talk about your second one in a little bit, but how many of those five do you think you’ve had?
Rosanne Cash:
Oh, I know of two others, so maybe I’ve had three. Have you had any?
Debbie Millman:
Well, ever since I read that, I’ve been thinking about it and I had one dream when I was in fifth grade as my life was falling apart, as my parents had gotten divorced, my mother got remarried and married a criminal and a bit of a monster, and I had this dream that I was looking out my back bedroom window and saw a pool party and knew that I was invited and was worried that I was late, and I went to the pool and I jumped in and everybody was saying, don’t cross that line, which was one of the buoys that you see in a pool or in a lake, and I wanted to. I went under the line and started drowning. At that moment in my dream, I was back in my room and the walls were cracking. I felt like I was being strangled to death by the water in this whirlpool. I don’t think I’ve ever told this dream to anybody by the way.
Rosanne Cash:
Really? But it stayed with you your entire life since-
Debbie Millman:
It stayed with me my entire life and in the very, very, very first diary that I ever wrote, I wrote about it that I’d had this dream, and that’s also why I am able to remember it, I think pretty accurately. I’m not remembering a memory of it. I’m remembering what I wrote about it at the time, which was vivid, and I think I was aware in that dream of my life about to fall apart. Up until that point, it was difficult but not unbearable, and for the next four years it became unbearable, and I think that was my higher self preparing me, I think, without my younger self then knowing it.
Rosanne Cash:
I would definitely call that a big dream.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. But I don’t know that I’ve had, and I’ve really been thinking about it because it’s come up in so much of your work that I’ve read, I’ve been thinking, what are the other big dreams? I think most of my other dreams are more conscious and more aspirational than psychological.
Rosanne Cash:
And organizing your experiences. Yeah. Another big dream I had is that I dreamed about my husband before I met him.
Debbie Millman:
Really?
Rosanne Cash:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
That one I don’t know about. Tell me.
Rosanne Cash:
I was sitting with him at the bottom of the ocean and I felt this profound, pure love. I looked at him at the bottom of the ocean where we were sitting together, and it was this overwhelming feeling that I had never experienced before of complete connection with another human being and how pure that love was. And I could see his eyes and his hair and it was him. I woke up and I thought, I want to feel like that in my life. And then it wasn’t long after that I met him. And it hit me the second I saw him, that’s the man who was in my dream. And then I thought, my life is going to get so complicated.
Debbie Millman:
And it did. It did. I want to go to that-
Rosanne Cash:
Oh God.
Debbie Millman:
… that part, but I do want to talk a little bit more about your origin story because the day after you graduated high school, your father took you on tour with him, and that’s when you learned how to play guitar. You learned from your stepmother, June Carter Cash. You learned from her sister Helen, from Mother Mabel Carter, as well as Carl Perkins, all of whom you were on the road with your father at the time with. Did learning to play music come as easily to you as writing poetry?
Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, for my skillset, yes. I’m not a great guitarist, a great technical musician, but it did feel incredibly natural to learn those, particularly those Appalachian ballads, the first songs I learned to play on guitar, it just made sense to me. I could see the shape of the chord changes. So that part came naturally to me. Now, I’m not a natural musician like my husband and my son are, who can hear very sophisticated chord voicings and chord progressions, and who have really advanced facility on a lot of different instruments. I don’t have that. I’m jealous of it, but the part that I do have is very natural.
Debbie Millman:
It was at that time in your life that you discovered your passion for songwriting, that you’ve talked about remaining undiminished to this day and led you into your life as a writer and a singer and into really your family’s vocation. Did you struggle at that time with the idea of following in the footsteps of your family?
Rosanne Cash:
Oh my God, yes.
Debbie Millman:
And having to measure up.
Rosanne Cash:
Well, yeah, I didn’t want to be in the shadow. I didn’t want to invite comparisons. I didn’t want the life. I knew what the life was like. I didn’t need that much attention. I was a shy person. I thought I would write songs purely for other people, and I was deeply passionate about that and about that career path. But I wrote songs, made demos of the songs, and I was in Germany at Christmas party with my friend who worked at Ariola Records, and she played it, my tape for the head of the label, and they wanted to sign me to make an album. And I was staying with her and I couldn’t get out of bed for three days. And she finally dragged me to a doctor and she said, “What’s wrong with her?” And he said, he talks to me for a while and he said, “She’s depressed.”
I was, I was trying to make a decision, did I want to do this in my life? I knew if I made an album, I knew everything that came with it. Then you toured, you had a public life, you had to figure out how to keep your private life safe, all of that. And then I decided to do it. I decided to make the record. That’s not to say that my life as a performer has been from by default because I did choose it, but it was not an easy choice.
Debbie Millman:
What made you decide to do it?
Rosanne Cash:
Maybe the connection. I wanted to feel my songs connect with people. I knew there was something about my voice that was good. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in it, but I knew that the tonal quality of it was pleasing and that there may be something I could do with that. But then I spent years feeling like performing was about being judged, that you went on stage so people could pick you apart and judge you. And then I came to understand that’s not what it’s about at all. It’s about energy exchange.
Debbie Millman:
I interviewed a designer named Bob Gill, very, very famous designer, very famous in the sixties and the seventies especially. And after I interviewed him, I went and saw him speak somewhere and the audience wasn’t quite laughing at his jokes and he said, “What are you? An audience or a jury?”
Rosanne Cash:
Well, good.
Debbie Millman:
You said that you wrote your first good song in 1978. You were 20 years old and you were in, I think the same friend who sent your music to Ariola, Renata Damm’s apartment in Germany, and it was titled, “This Has Happened Before,” and you’ve said this about the song. “It was a young woman’s song, tentative and too self-referential, too navel-gazing, but not to an extreme that would make you squirm. It’s well constructed, painstaking even, and I could hear the hard work in it. I was very proud when I finished that song, and it was the first time I felt like a real songwriter.” And this is a question that I ask almost every songwriter that I’ve ever interviewed. Can you talk about what happens to you when you’re writing a song? Where does a song come from?
Rosanne Cash:
Oh, God. A song comes from a mystery. There’s a mystery about songwriting that if you could pin it down and say what it was, then it wouldn’t be songwriting anymore. It comes from some creative source that’s undefinable like all creative work, I think, and to tap into that and get the thrill of that energy of being inside it and having it inside of you, that’s the ultimate. I’m sure you know it in your own work too. It’s like you know when it’s jagged and troubling and then you know when suddenly it opens up and that you feel this rush of it being right, everything’s moving as it should. And writing a song, sometimes in the beginning I’ll have that burst of inspiration and I see the full potential of the song, even though I haven’t written it yet. Then I start working and then it’s drudgery. It’s like painstaking, as you said, finding the right line, finding the right word, the chord progression, turning that line over in your hand like Natalie Goldberg said, “Turning it over in your hand like a rock until it’s smooth.”
Then all of the doubt and self-annihilation, like, why am I doing this? This is shit. What made me think I could become a songwriter, Bob Dylan, why should I bother Bob Dylan at all? And if you can just put that aside, the internal critic long enough that you can then get home with the song, get to the end of it and complete and then edit. And there are some songs that the thrill of it all opening up has been longer than the drudgery part and others where the reverse was true.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve written how your friend in songwriting mentor, John Stewart, told you that we’re all just radios hoping to pick up each other’s signals and have stated that you’ve spent your whole life trying to clear the static. How do you do that?
Rosanne Cash:
Oh, boy. It’s a daily process, isn’t it? I know what frees me up, solitude, the ocean, going to look at visual art, talking with someone I really respect, who’s also an artist, going to a new place, nature. Yeah. There are a lot of things that clear the static.
Debbie Millman:
Your first album came about because your friend gave your songs to a record company in Germany. And I love that despite having a parent who was one of the most famous singer-songwriters in the world, you were recommended to your first record label by a friend in Munich.
Rosanne Cash:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And I also read that you wanted to change your name because you didn’t want to be associated or think that your success or any success that came was because of any family favor.
Rosanne Cash:
I did think about changing my name to Rosanne Rivers, which is my paternal grandmother’s maiden name, and I just mentioned that to my dad that I was thinking about changing my name and he didn’t say anything. And then when I made my first album under my own name, he said, “I’m so glad you did that.” It would’ve hurt him. And he’s told me that, that he would’ve been hurt by that. And I see why now. I’m proud of my legacy. There’s no reason to deny it, but as a young person in her early twenties, I was just floundering. How do I carve something out for myself?
Debbie Millman:
Well, while you were making your first record, a record producer named Bernie Von Ficht had wanted you to record a song called “Lucky,” and despite his plea, you refused. He went on to give it to another artist who ended up having an enormous hit with it. And you’ve said that you wouldn’t have recorded the song even if you had known it would sell triple platinum because you knew you’d have to sing it for the rest of your life.
Rosanne Cash:
It’s so true.
Debbie Millman:
Were you always that certain of what you wanted to record?
Rosanne Cash:
Oddly-
Debbie Millman:
But where did that strength come from?
Rosanne Cash:
I don’t know, but oddly, yes. From a really young age, I had this right or wrong, this powerful sense of what song was right for me, and I betrayed myself a couple of times when someone twisted my arm, but not that often. I don’t know where it came because early on that would’ve just been pure hubris because I didn’t know anything yet except I knew that. I don’t know how I knew it. Maybe it was because of everything I listened to from early childhood on. Maybe it was just I was always a very determined, ambitious person. I don’t know.
Debbie Millman:
How were you managing the idea of becoming a singer-songwriter, performing for the public and balancing that with your distaste for fame and attention?
Rosanne Cash:
Oh, I had a lot of anxiety, so much anxiety and trying to learn how to balance it, wanting to keep my private life and working really hard to do that. Learning how to work with a band, I was a neophyte, was trying to figure it out, and I didn’t have much confidence as a performer. I was developing a lot of confidence as a songwriter, but not so much as a performer.
Debbie Millman:
Your first album was only distributed in Europe and is now a collector’s item?
Rosanne Cash:
I hope not.
Debbie Millman:
It is going for quite a lot of money on eBay. When you came back to the US, your album Seven Year Ache was a huge hit and the song itself reached number one in the country charts the week of your 25th birthday even crossed over into the pop charts where it reached number 22. Two more number one singles followed from it, “Blue Moon with Heartache,” and “My Baby Thinks He’s a Train.” Now, despite the recognition and the accolades, you said that during that entire period, you felt a constant slow burn of panic.
Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, I did.
Debbie Millman:
What was your family thinking at this time? What did your mother and father think about what you were doing and your stepmother? And were they helping you manage through that panic? Did you share that with them?
Rosanne Cash:
No, I didn’t share it with them. I’ve not been good about that through my life of asking for help. I wish I had actually, my dad could have helped me more. Well, I had a baby at 24, and then this big record at 25, it got to number one on my 25 birthday, and I was just terrified. I was panicked as a new mother. I was panicked that I was becoming famous, and yet Debbie, there was something so, I don’t want to say preordained because that sounds very grand, but it seemed like, Oh yeah, this was always going to happen. This is what was meant to happen. Deal with it.
Debbie Millman:
By the time you released the album Rhythm and Romance in 1985, you were sure you were never going to set foot in a recording studio again.
Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, I had a miserable experience making that album.
Debbie Millman:
Is that your least favorite album?
Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, probably because it was so hard making it, and it was right in a period in the eighties where we just overused all kinds of layered sounds, synthesizer sounds. It’s probably coming back and being trendy now. Everybody loves what’s going on in the eighties, but it was three producers. I made it in New York, LA and Nashville. I started on April 16th of one year, and it finished on April 15th of the following year. There was an executive producer I didn’t get along with, and we literally had yelling fights in the studio. It was just painful all the way around, and at the end of it, I said, “I’m never making another record.” And then I started getting notices from my record label, from the lawyers that I was in breach of contract that I owed them an album, I owed them an album. It kept coming, and I would just tear up the letters and throw them away.
Debbie Millman:
I was wondering what changed your mind.
Rosanne Cash:
Rodney Crowell changed my mind.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Your first husband, producer of many of your early albums. One thing that I read as you were beginning to record King’s Record Shop, your next album, was that you read an interview with Linda Ronstadt wherein she stated that in committing to artistic growth, you had to refine your skills to support your instincts.
Rosanne Cash:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
And you’ve said that made such a deep impression on you that you clipped the article to save it.
Rosanne Cash:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Did that impact how you were approaching King’s Record Shop?
Rosanne Cash:
It did. Yeah. I put that in my wallet. I cut it out and put it in my wallet, and I thought, anything that’s fraudulent up to this point, any way I’ve been a dilettante, any way I’ve just been posting or being cavalier about my work, it has to stop now. I kept that in the forefront, and I remember it being hard. It was like, now you know if you’re on your phone and there’s something really interesting about somebody’s talking to you and trying to get your attention and you keep pulling away and looking at the person who’s talking to you, but going back to your phone, which is an awful thing to do, by the way, that’s what it felt like when I was trying to pull myself into a deeper relationship with my own work.
Debbie Millman:
And yet King’s Record Shop had four number one singles, which was a first for a woman in the industry.
Rosanne Cash:
Yep, it was.
Debbie Millman:
Did that success come with any pressure to continue doing the same kind of work? The opposite of what Linda Ronstadt was recommending?
Rosanne Cash:
Absolutely. The guys at the label, they see that and they’re like, okay, go do that again. It was enormously successful.
Debbie Millman:
Especially if this was the contracted record.
Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, just go do that again. Deliver it to us. So I had a lot of leverage with them, and I was starting to write some very dark songs. It was right at the beginning of when my marriage was falling apart, but I had a lot of leverage because of the success of King’s Record Shop. So I went to the label and I said, I want to produce the next record myself, and I want a lot of money. And they said okay to both. So I got a lot of money. I went in the studio with these dark little songs, hired the band, hired a great engineer, Roger Nichols, recorded it analog, and everybody was going digital at that point, but we recorded analog, and I made this album that I thought was the truest reflection of who I was up to that point, and the label didn’t want it.
Debbie Millman:
I know, I’ve listened to it so many times in prep for this interview as well as listening to it when it first came out.
Rosanne Cash:
Interiors.
Debbie Millman:
Interiors, yes. And it’s so interesting. So many people talked about it as your divorce record, but you weren’t divorced yet, so it was this, as you would put it, postcard to the future. I see it as a departure record-
Rosanne Cash:
Oh, yeah.
Debbie Millman:
… and a conduit to a new way of making music. That felt like almost like the necessary stop to clear everything out to then begin again.
Rosanne Cash:
You’re absolutely right. It was a turnstile. It was a-
Debbie Millman:
Turnstile, yeah.
Rosanne Cash:
… and it was a reset, and it was the culmination of pulling my face away from the phone, to use that metaphor again. It was like, okay, I’ve committed to this deeper relationship to refining my skills so I can support these instincts, as Linda said.
Debbie Millman:
Now, the album, despite the record executive’s response, the album was nominated for a Grammy.
Rosanne Cash:
It was.
Debbie Millman:
You Lost to John Prine, so basically you didn’t lose.
Rosanne Cash:
That’s so true. In fact, I would’ve been embarrassed if I had won against John Prine.
Debbie Millman:
How do you view that work now? Because at the time, you thought it was your best work to date. The record company didn’t think so. They didn’t support it, so it didn’t sell as well because it wasn’t supported, not because it wasn’t very good. Obviously it was nominated for a Grammy. How do you view that work now all these years later?
Rosanne Cash:
Well, I should say I was signed to the country division of Columbia then, and it was nominated in the folk category, so the wider industry got it. They knew it wasn’t a country record. And the country division of my label knew it wasn’t a country record, which is why they didn’t want to do anything with it. But people outside of that got it, and then they put it in the right category for the Grammys. So how do I view it now? I view it as the moment my life changed. I view it as the moment that I recommitted and some of the songs are a little navel-gazing. I wish I had sung certain things better. I wish I had arranged it. I wish I had been a more deft producer. All of those things, you can look back at your work and go, Oh, I could have done that better, but it’s an accurate reflection of the moment, except for one thing.
Debbie Millman:
What?
Rosanne Cash:
There’s one song on that record that makes me cringe, and it wasn’t my fault. Well, it was my fault because I let it on the record, but when I finished the album, I played it for Rodney who hadn’t heard it in the studio at all, and he loved it, and he said, “But it’s not finished. You need one more song. You need something that’s really up tempo. This is a really dark ballad kind of record.” I was devastated when he said that, and he says, “No, come on. Just try write this song with me.” And so we wrote this song called “Real Woman,” and I was not interested, not attached to this song, but I thought, well, maybe he knows something I don’t know.
So I just almost divorced myself from the recording of that one song. I did my part, he was going to put some guitars on his overdub. I went shopping like, okay, do it. I’ll come back and listen later. And I came back in and he played it, the overdubs for me and what he had done, and he said, “What do you think?” I said, “I think it sounds like a fucking Pepsi commercial,” but I put it on the record Debbie. That’s my fault, but I can’t listen to it now.
Debbie Millman:
If you re-release it, you can take it out.
Rosanne Cash:
I will. But I told that story, I wrote about that in my memoir, and after Rodney read my memoir, he goes, “Oh man, I really cringed when I read that chapter.”
Debbie Millman:
Oh, I thought you were very nice to him in the memoir.
Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, I was.
Debbie Millman:
What is it like to weather the whims of an audience, and how much does that impact how you feel about what you do?
Rosanne Cash:
There are certain ways it does impact me. The letters I get when people say, this song got me through a really hard time, Black Cadillac got me through losing someone, or Interiors was my divorce record. I listened to it through a really painful time. That means something to me. I don’t take that lightly. That’s an honor if you can help someone vicariously in that way. I got really also, this is funny, I got really discouraged a few years ago. What is the point? Why am I doing this? I’m at the point of irrelevancy and I said something on Twitter, I’m sequencing my album, but I wonder what the point is. Nobody listens to albums in sequence anymore because you stream and it random play or whatever it’s called.
I said, nobody cares about that. And I got instantly back a couple hundred tweets. I care, I care, I care. Take your time. Sequence it like you want it done. That’s the way I want to listen to it, the way the artist hears the sequence. And I was floored, and I think that there’s a core audience that I have that has stayed with me through thick and thin, through the bad records, through the good records, through the bad shows and the good shows, and they let me know they’re devoted and I’m devoted to them. Like I said, it’s energy exchange.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve talked about trying to perform or performing for the 6% of the audience who are poets.
Rosanne Cash:
Only on a bad night.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, only on a bad night, because I was like, that seems like a really low percentage of the people that would be coming to see Rosanne Cash. I would imagine that they’re all poets at heart.
Rosanne Cash:
Well, I took that line from my friend and mentor, John Stewart, who’s sadly no longer with us, but he said, because I called him up after I had a bad show, and I was lying in bed after the show just filled with anxiety like, Oh, God, what I did, dah, dah, dah. And I called him up next day and just vented, just terrible. And he said, “So you had a bad gig. What do you want me to do? Realign the planets? Sing to the 6% who are poets.” And that’s on a bad night when people are on their phones and aren’t listening. But the other times I can feel it when 94% are connecting with me.
Debbie Millman:
I think this is around the time you had another of your significant dreams about an old man named Art.
Rosanne Cash:
That was around the time of King’s Record Shop when we were talking about deepening the relationship. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
And I believe that… Well, can you tell the dream? I think it would be better if you should.
Rosanne Cash:
Yeah. I dreamed that I was at a party, and at this time I should say I had cut out Linda Ronstadt’s interview and put it in my purse. So sometime after that, I dreamed I was at a party and Linda was sitting talking to a man named Art, a little old man, and they were deep in conversation and they were sitting on a bench, and I went up and I sat next to Linda and I tried to join the conversation and Art looked at me very coldly, and he said, “We don’t respect dilettantes,” and he turned away and continued his conversation with Linda. Oh my God. I woke up just devastated. I knew what it meant.
Debbie Millman:
I would love for you to tell me what it meant.
Rosanne Cash:
That I was, as I said before, that there was moments of just coasting, of just casually touching the work instead of really going deep into it, being distracted and just showing up for the bare minimum or this is all an inside game, you realize. I don’t know that other people would see that or know that, but as an inside game, it was real. And the larger idea of art was telling me that I better start showing up or I was cut out of the party, out of the conversation.
Debbie Millman:
Well, it was a good dream to have, as difficult as it was, it ended up propelling you to move to where you really wanted to live, which was Manhattan. You moved to Morton Street in Greenwich Village, one of the greatest streets on the planet, just a few steps from Matt Umanov Guitars. It’s really interesting, your moth talk. You talked about how New York at that time was kicking your ass until the real you showed up. And I love that New York does that. New York kicks your ass until you really show up.
Rosanne Cash:
That’s right.
Debbie Millman:
How did it do that for you? How was it doing it for you at that time?
Rosanne Cash:
Well, it was complicated by the fact that I was going through a divorce when I first moved to New York in 1991, I was confused. I was in love with John Leventhal, but we weren’t together. I was writing songs that were just gut-wrenching from the depths, and I didn’t know what to do with them, and I didn’t have good friends in the city yet, although I had been to the city many times that I knew people, I didn’t have a deep network that could support me.
All of the little things like the construction guys would yell at you, and the homeless guy who threw a rock at my head and getting lost, and part of the story I told in the moths about getting on the subway, it was when we used tokens on the subways, not a metro card. Getting on the subway with a token in my pocket and realizing that I had left my wallet at home and that it was my last token, and getting out of the subway into a downpour, like a monsoon and having no money to buy an umbrella or get back on the subway or get a taxi and just standing there going, what-
Debbie Millman:
Now what?
Rosanne Cash:
Now what? So yeah, it kicks your ass.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, but you have to tell the best part that you get a phone call.
Rosanne Cash:
Okay. The best part. I wasn’t going to tell that. So I had my five pound nineties phone with me. You remember those old phones?
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. Oh yeah.
Rosanne Cash:
And at that moment, the phone rings and I stepped under an awning and answered the phone, and I miserably said Hello, and his voice said, “Rosanne, this is Al Gore.” And I said, “Mr. Vice President, so nice to hear from you.” And he said, “I’m over at the Regency,” or wherever he was. He said, “Can you come over? I want to talk to you about this new environmental initiative I’m doing, and I’d want a concert attached to it, and I wanted to talk to you about that,” because I had done a couple of things like that for him before. And I thought really quickly, and I thought, I can’t walk there. I’ll be a drowned rat by the time I get there. I have no money to get over there. So I made some excuse to not go meet the vice president to help save the planet.
Debbie Millman:
I am glad that you ultimately did meet and continue to work together.
Rosanne Cash:
Absolutely.
Debbie Millman:
But there’s something so wonderfully human about that story. It allows me to forgive myself for so many things.
Rosanne Cash:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
I just need you to know that.
Rosanne Cash:
I’m so glad. I suffered for you.
Debbie Millman:
Thank you. Rosanne, most of your albums since the album after Interiors, which was The Wheel, Rules of Travel, the multi Grammy Award-winning The River and The Thread feature you writing almost all or co-writing with your husband, as you’ve mentioned, the Grammy Award-winning musician and producer, John Leventhal. I’m wondering how do you feel your writing has evolved since Kings [Record Shop]?
Rosanne Cash:
Well, I think that I don’t overuse nature metaphors like I used to. I think that I am not as navel-gazing, that I’ve turned outward, that I’m not as subsumed in the intricacies of romance all the time, although that’s still very interesting to me. But that there are wider subject matters out in the world that I’m interested in writing about as well, and that I’m more willing to take on difficult topics and not care how they’re received.
Debbie Millman:
In many ways, I see your work evolving very similarly, the way Joni Mitchell’s work has evolved, where the writing is so much more sophisticated. There are poems that could stand on their own, there are poems set to music, and they tackle deep human experiences, sometimes including love, but certainly not entirely.
Rosanne Cash:
Well, I am incredibly honored to be compared to Joni in any way, I revere her. But yeah, the song that comes to mind right now is a song I wrote two years ago called “The Killing Fields.”
Debbie Millman:
I love that song. That song is magnificent.
Rosanne Cash:
Thank you. And it’s not on any album, but I wrote it during the Black Lives Matter protests about lynchings in Arkansas.
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Rosanne Cash:
I knew that’s not going to be on Top 40 radio, but it was essential that I write it, and I’m incredibly proud of that song. And I saw how it should be laid out before I wrote it, and I saw that it should be in the tradition of a narrative ballad, so it was like building the structure and foundation of a house before I could fill in the verses.
Debbie Millman:
After the success of The River and The Thread, you won, I think three Grammys for that album. Folks were telling you that you had to make another record just like it. Hadn’t they learned already that wasn’t the path you were going to take? But how hard is it to move away from what you know is successful?
Rosanne Cash:
It’s not hard for me. I still have that same youthful hubris of going, but I know what’s right for me. After The River and The Thread, which I love that record, I’m proud of that record, but after that, there was so much happening. It was the Me Too movement. It was Donald Trump getting elected. I’m the mother of five children. It was tearing me apart, and my daughter said to me after Trump got elected, she said, “I feel like I don’t matter,” and that just killed me. It just struck me at the core. And all of this swirling around, I thought, I have to write. I want to make a record that’s addressing these things, that’s about feminine experience, capital F, the betrayals, the longing, love, insecurity, rage, loss, all of it. And so that’s what I set out to do.
Debbie Millman:
Rosanne, in addition to weathering the ups and downs of the music industry, you’ve also had to weather some difficult health issues. You lost your voice for two and a half years due to polyps. Several years ago you had brain surgery. The technical term for the procedure you had was, I’m going to try to do this, a decompression craniectomy and laminectomy for Chiari one syringomyelia.
Rosanne Cash:
Chiari one.
Debbie Millman:
Was I even close?
Rosanne Cash:
Pretty close.
Debbie Millman:
That resulted in you getting 19 staples-
Rosanne Cash:
In the back of my head.
Debbie Millman:
… the back of your head.
Rosanne Cash:
Yeah. That was fun.
Debbie Millman:
So two and a half years of polyps and then at least a year’s recovery from your brain surgery, how were you able to manage a life without music during those times or a life with different kinds of music?
Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, a life without singing, really, that was an eye-opener. When I had the polyps at first, I thought, well, it’s not going to make that much difference to me, because I think of myself as a writer first and a songwriter and losing my voice, it’s not going to matter. I was devastated. I had no idea how central to my self-image my voice was. So losing it. That was painful and hard. But I did develop this cottage industry of writing prose, and I kept getting commissions to write essays for different magazines. So that was-
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, New York Times was a wonderful piece.
Rosanne Cash:
Thank you. Everything from Martha Stewart Living to the Times, Rolling Stones. So it was a little doorway that has panned out very well for me. And the brain surgery, it took a couple years to recover from that. That was really hard. And I’m recovering from knee replacement surgery right now, which is really difficult. But at bottom, I’m an optimist and I think of myself as a healthy person, and I don’t like leading with disease and injury. I don’t like that to be part of my-
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. I was actually even struggling to decide whether or not to include it, but I felt like it showed so much about your resilience and your stamina, and then when I saw that you said that at a various forms of personal catastrophe comes art if you’re lucky. I thought, okay, that’s an optimistic way of looking at these really hard things.
Rosanne Cash:
Well, yeah, I think being an optimist is the number one responsibility in parenthood because you can’t steal a child’s future by being pessimistic. You can be pessimistic about your own life, but man, keep it to yourself. Don’t pass it on to your kids, because they have everything ahead of them. And luckily, I’m naturally very optimistic, and I think my kids they take that on.
Debbie Millman:
Rosanne, the last thing I want to talk with you about is the brand new re-release of your album, The Wheel. It has been remastered as an expanded edition to celebrate the album’s 30th anniversary. Congratulations on that.
Rosanne Cash:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
What was it like revisiting these recordings?
Rosanne Cash:
I should first say that I got the master back from Sony after 30 years. It was in my contract.
Debbie Millman:
I was actually going to ask you that.
Rosanne Cash:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, it was in your contract. I was going to ask you if you had to buy them back.
Rosanne Cash:
No, it was in my contract. There was a 30 year reversion, so I got it back, and I didn’t expect to feel the way I felt when I got it back. I didn’t expect that ownership of my master recording after all these years would be an almost spiritual experience. There’s just something about it. It’s mine. So John and I decided to form a record label to remaster it and re-release it. It was never released on vinyl the first time because in ’93 you weren’t pressing vinyl.
Debbie Millman:
CDs. Yeah.
Rosanne Cash:
So it’s on vinyl the first time. We’re doing a double vinyl thing where the other record is a live recording I did in 1993, and I rewrote new liner notes for it. It’s a beautiful package and everything. To revisit it, I don’t like looking back generally, I really don’t, because I go back with two critical, an ear, go, I should have sung that better. Oh, I sound like such a baby. Why didn’t I change that line? But owning it gave me this window to looking at it differently, which is that it was an incredibly important time in my life. It was the first record that John and I made together. First songs we wrote together. We developed a partnership in both music and in life that has lasted all these 30 years. We fell in love while making that record, and it started a whole legacy for me. So I love the record for what it is. It’s an accurate reflection of that time, and I feel really proud about putting it out again 30 years later.
Debbie Millman:
RumbleStrip is the name of your record company. Are you going to re-release any other of your acquired masters?
Rosanne Cash:
Yeah, they’ll start falling like dominoes. I’m going to start getting a lot of them back, because some were 30, some were 35 years. And yeah, I am going to re-master and release some of the old ones. I don’t know which ones yet.
Debbie Millman:
Rosanne, I want to end the show today with another short excerpt from your memoir. You state, “I have been lucky. I have also been driven by a deep love and obsession with language, poetry and melody. I had first wanted to be a writer in a quiet room, setting depth charges of emotion in the outside world where my readers would know me only by my language. Then I decided I wanted to be a songwriter, writing not for myself, but for other voices who would be the vehicles for the songs I created. Then despite myself, I began performing my own songs, which rattled me to the core. It took me a long time to grow into an ambition for what I had already committed myself to doing, but I knew I could be good at it if I put my mind to it. So I put my mind to it.” Rosanne Cash, thank you for putting your mind to it. Thank you for making so much art and music and writing that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Rosanne Cash:
Thank you, Debbie. This was a wonderful experience to speak with you. Thank you so much.
Debbie Millman:
Rosanne Cash’s latest album is the 30th anniversary re-release and remastering of her extraordinary album, The Wheel. You can read more about her body of work and her new record label at Rosannecash.com. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we could make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.