Unless you’ve spent the last 50 years cryogenically frozen in deep space, you may have heard of Rosanne Cash‘s father, Johnny Cash. When Rosanne locked in on becoming a successful country singer/songwriter, she had a formidable set of footsteps to follow. But she isn’t one to duck a challenge. Twenty of her singles cracked the top 20 in the country charts from 1979 to 1990, with 11 reaching the number-one spot. Her new album, The List (out next week on EMI/Manhattan), is a terrific reworking of country classics, handpicked from a list of indispensable songs her dad made for her 36 years ago. Having Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Jeff Tweedy and Rufus Wainwright appear as guest artists on the record is a nice fit. Rosanne will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week long. Read our Q&A with her.
Cash: Misterioso is not the Thelonious Monk live recording. This Misterioso is a classical record by a trio headed by Russian pianist Alexei Lubimov, performing works by modern composers, most notably the great Arvo Pärt. Everyone needs a record to make them cry, and this is one of them for me. If I am bottled up with feelings of unknown origin, if I am existentially sad and need something to provide poetic context, I can put this record on and within a few bars of hearing Pärt’s “Spiegel Im Spiegel,” I’m flooded with tears. Who knew it would be the clarinet, not the violin, that can provoke and give context to all the unnamed emotional turbulence? I found this record shortly after seeing an art exhibition in Paris, in November 2005, called Melancholy: Genius And Madness In The West. This was one of the greatest art shows I have ever seen. Several hundred years of depression, despair, madness and genius spread out over several rooms at the Grand Palais. It was absolutely fantastic. All the torments of humankind were out where you could see them: on canvas and in sculpture and in carefully constructed mise-en-scénes. It was liberating and comforting. Ah, I’m not the only one who has made all those excursions down the rabbit hole! It is only in modern times that we have become so uncomfortable with depression and despair that we medicate it away; for centuries, people exorcised it all through art and music. There was a compilation record that was made especially for the exhibit, and it was played over speakers as you wandered through the rooms. I bought it as I left the Grand Palais, and it’s gorgeously sad. Melancholy and Misterioso usually can instantly transmute depression into poetic sadness, but if they don’t work, I dig out Samuel Barber’s “Adagio For Strings” and open a bottle of Bordeaux.
One reply on “Rosanne Cash Can’t Resist: “Misterioso” And “Melancholy””
On the other hand, you could argue that, today, not enough people are “medicating away” their depression and despair. Now we have people, both the famous and the hitherto unknown, using media such as Dr. Phil, Oprah, and Larry King for a little “on-air therapy,” which seems at once bizarre, ridiculous, and wholly inappropriate. If anything, this society has become a little too comfortable with the personal torments of others–if we’ve seen fit to make entertainment out of it. If only more people nowadays would turn to art and music to exorcise their personal despair as an alternative to that.