Rescued from Cash’s low ebb in the early 1990s, this fun, lightweight song is a long way from the moody recordings with Rick Rubin he soon turned towards
, the early 90s are held to be among his lowest ebbs: the lull that made the triumphant final act of his career – the American Recordings series with Rick Rubin, critical acclaim, Grammy awards, platinum sales and all – seem all the more startling. He’d been dropped by Columbia Records after 28 years and a brief and turbulent period with Mercury had yielded mixed artistic dividends and indifferent sales.
You might consider it an era in Cash’s artistic life best forgotten, but posthumous retrospection has a way of recalibrating history: just as David Bowie’s 1990s output has been significantly upgraded since his death, so a collection of Johnny Cash songwriting demos that no label wanted in 1993 emerges 31 years later,
Quite what these demos sounded like before their original instrumentation was stripped away and replaced with new arrangements in a classic Cash style is a matter of conjecture but the first single, Well Alright, comes from a different world to the flinty, austere music that would reinvigorate Cash’s career a year after it was recorded.
It’s good enough to make you believe that Cash’s 1993 demos don’t deserve to languish in obscurity, without ever suggesting his career would have blossomed again in the way it did without Rick Rubin’s vision: had it been released shortly after it was recorded, it would doubtless have met the same fate as the singles taken from 1991’s The Mystery of Life.
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