Rosanne Cash - The River & The Thread

[Music Head]

enters the Billboard chart this week at #11

allmusic gives it a 2.4 of 3.0
Spotify online listen
this will be the first album of the year to head to the wish list
need I say more



Bio - from allmusic

The history of popular music is littered with the careers of the children of famous artists, performers who manage to carve out some small
measure of success based far less on talent than on the recognition that their famous names afford them. Perhaps no greater exception to this
trend was Rosanne Cash, the daughter of Johnny Cash, whose idiosyncratic and innovative music made her one of the preeminent singer/songwriters
of her day.

Born May 24, 1955, to her father and his first wife, Vivian Liberto, Rosanne was raised by her mother in Southern California after her parents
separated in the early '60s. She was largely uninfluenced by her father's music until she joined his road show following her graduation from
high school; over a three-year period, she was promoted from handling the tour's laundry duties to performing, first as a backup singer and then
as an infrequent soloist. Still, Cash remained unsure about choosing a career in music, and took some acting classes; not wishing to succeed
solely on the basis of her family's influence, she also worked as a secretary in London and traveled extensively abroad.

After releasing an eponymously titled solo record -- later disavowed -- in Germany in 1978, Cash signed with Columbia Records, and began
performing with Texas singer/songwriter Rodney Crowell, who produced three songs for her American debut, 1979's Right or Wrong. The record
featured three Top 25 hits, including "No Memories Hangin' Round," a duet with Bobby Bare. The same year, she and Crowell also married. Cash
issued her commercial breakthrough, Seven Year Ache, in 1981; not only did the album yield three number one singles, the title track even
crossed over into the Top 30 on Billboard's pop chart. However, the follow-up, 1982's Somewhere in the Stars, was a rush job, recorded during
Cash's pregnancy. While failing to repeat Seven Year Ache's success, it did produce two more Top Ten singles, "Ain't No Money" and "I Wonder."

After a three-year hiatus, Cash returned with her most significant artistic statement yet in Rhythm & Romance, a deft fusion of country and pop
that won wide acclaim from both camps. The record earned her two more number ones, "I Don't Know Why You Don't Want Me" (co-written with
Crowell) and a cover of Tom Petty's "Never Be You." In 1987, she issued King's Record Shop, a meditation on country music traditions that
generated four successive number one hits in John Hiatt's "The Way We Make a Broken Heart," "Tennessee Flat Top Box" (a hit for her father in
1961), "If You Change Your Mind," and John Stewart's "Runaway Train." Also hitting number one was "It's Such a Small World," a duet with Crowell
from his Diamonds & Dirt LP; not surprisingly, she was named Billboard's Top Singles Artist in 1988.

The next year, Cash assembled the retrospective Hits 1979-1989; one of the record's few new songs, a cover of the Beatles' "I Don't Want to
Spoil the Party," pushed the consecutive number ones streak to five. By 1990, her marriage to Crowell was beginning to dissolve; Interiors, an
essay on the couple's relationship, was released the following year, and while the record was the subject of great critical acclaim, it was a
commercial failure that generated only one Top 40 hit, "What We Really Want." In 1991, Cash and Crowell divorced; The Wheel, released in 1993,
was an unflinchingly confessional examination of the marriage's failure that ranked as her most musically diverse effort to date.

After a three-year hiatus, Cash returned with a vengeance in 1996; not only did she publish her first book, a short-story collection titled
Bodies of Water, but she also issued her first release on Capitol Records, 10 Song Demo, an 11-cut collection of stark home recordings released
with minimal studio gloss. In 2003, Cash returned with Rules of Travel, an album five years in the making and her first full-fledged studio
release since The Wheel. Sony reissued Interiors, King's Record Shop, and Seven Year Ache in 2005, as well as the greatest-hits collection Blue
Moons and Broken Hearts: The Anthology 1979-1995. Cash returned to the studio that same year, releasing Black Cadillac in January of 2006.

In late 2007 Cash announced that she had been diagnosed with Chiari malformation, and was due to have brain surgery. After successful treatment
for the condition, her slow route to recovery -- which included periods of being confined to her bed, as well as a fair amount of time being
assisted in relearning certain patterns of speech -- led to a late-2008 return to the studio and the stage. Her subsequent project, The List,
which appeared in 2009, featured songs from a personal list her father gave her when she turned 18 of what he considered the 100 most essential
American songs, and the result was both a personal and a testimonial statement. Another hiatus from album preparation followed and in 2010 she
published the acclaimed memoir Composed before founding and hosting the Johnny Cash Music Festival in 2011, in order to raise money for the
restoration of her father's childhood home in Arkansas. Next, her 2012 song "Land of Dreams" was used in a worldwide campaign to promote the
American tourist industry, before 2013 brought sessions for her first album of original material in eight years. The River & the Thread was
expected in early 2014.

Album Review - from allmusic



Nearly eight years after Rosanne Cash last released a set of original songs, 2014's The River & the Thread finds her in a reflective mood, and
just as 2009's The List saw her looking back with a set of classic songs recommended by her father, the late country legend Johnny Cash, The
River & the Thread is dominated by thoughts and emotions that occurred to her as she was involved in a project to restore Johnny's boyhood home.
This doesn't mean that Cash has returned to the spunky, country-accented sound of her most popular work -- this is still Rosanne Cash the mature
and thoughtful singer/songwriter we've come to know since the late '90s, and the tone of this album is unfailingly literate. But though this
music isn't country, it's certainly Southern, and road trips from Alabama to Tennessee, visits to the Tallahatchie Bridge and Money Street, and
vintage gospel music on the radio embroider these songs as Cash immerses herself in the places that were once close to home as if she's
reuniting with long lost family. And two of the songs cut especially close to home -- "Etta's Tune" was written in memory of Marshall Grant, a
longtime family friend and member of Johnny Cash's band, while "When the Master Calls the Roll" is a tale of love torn apart during the Civil
War that Cash wrote in collaboration with her former husband Rodney Crowell and current spouse John Leventhal -- and they rank with the best
material on the album, genuine and heartfelt, and written and performed with a genuine passion that never sinks into sentimental histrionics.
Just as Cash's songs are crafted with a subtle intelligence, her vocals here are superb, getting to the heart of the lyrics without painting
herself into a corner, and the production is rich but elegant and to the point. Rosanne Cash hasn't been especially prolific in the 21st
century, and at under 40 minutes, she wasn't crafting an epic with The River & the Thread. But she's learned to make every word and every note
count, and this album confirms once again that she's matured into a singular artist with the talent and the vision to make these stories of her
travels in the South come to vivid and affecting life.

how can you not love this:

[video=youtube;dnoXkNncmY0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnoXkNncmY0[/video]

Track Listing

1. A Feather's Not a Bird
2. The Sunken Lands
3. Etta's Tune
4. Modern Blue
5. Tell Heaven
6. The Long Way Home
7. World of Strange Design
8. Night School
9. 50,000 Watts
10. When the Master Calls the Roll
11. Money Road

[R_burke]

I got it, I like it

"But she's learned to make every word and every note count, and this album confirms once again that she's matured into a singular artist with the talent and the vision to make these stories of her travels in the South come to vivid and affecting life." This pretty much sums it up for me.