As a PSA, Johnny Cash’s 6th and final album from the American Recordings is being released tomorrow (the tracks were recorded during the same sessions for American V: A Hundred Highways). Amazon seems to currently have the best price on it if you preorder.
From Lost Highway Records:
The songs on American VI are drawn from all over the musical landscape and from various eras, and include Sheryl Crow’s moving “Redemption Day,” close Cash friend Kris Kristofferson’s “For The Good Times,” “Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound” by Tom Paxton, Bob Nolan’s “Cool Water,” the hopeful “Last Night I had the Strangest Dream” by Ed McCurdy, J.H. Red Hayes and Jack Rhodes’s “Satisfied Mind,” Queen Lili’uokalani’s song of farewell, “Aloha Oe,” and the never before heard Cash original, “I Corinthians: 15:55,” written over the last three years of his life.
And a review from the Independent:
As with A Hundred Highways, the song selection lacks the shock value of earlier volumes in the series, eschewing transformative covers like Cash’s version of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” in favour of material that fits the ageing troubadour like well-worn-in boots. Once again, death stalks these songs, though this time it’s the singer’s own looming mortality, rather than the emotional trauma of his wife’s passing, which seems to haunt them. “Ain’t no grave can hold my body down,” sings Cash on the title-track, but the arrangement suggests otherwise, a funereal shuffle-slouch with plaintive banjo underpinned by sepulchral organ and a few portentous piano chords. Of course, it’s not Cash’s body that survives, but his art and his lingering stature as a giant of American music.
