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: There are very few people in this world I actually worship, and Maira Kalman is one of those few. I haven’t gone so far as to make a shrine or keep a picture of Maira in a locket around my neck, but I’m close. Every time I read her blog And The Pursuit Of Happiness or her book The Principles Of Uncertainty or look at her photos or paintings, I get a rush of crazy energy in my stomach and a feeling that I might fly out of my body with happiness and inspiration. This is not something I feel every day, I promise. One of my favorite blog posts is on Paris: “The application of lipstick … The first superlative tassel … The wrapping of the parcel … The pink bed.” Yes, of course. That is Paris, exactly. Maira lives her life as a pure expression of art, a most elegant and gracious soul, a teacher and a poet. I love her very much. I want to look at people and at life the way Maira does. I am writing my memoir now, and I’m nearly finished. I have had a zerox of one of Maira’s paintings taped to the top of my computer the whole time I have been writing this book—for years. It is a picture of a woman in a respectable black dress with a white collar, standing by a tree, with a branch in her hand. At the bottom of the picture it says: “The woman stood in front of the tree before she went mad. She wrote a book and then she went mad. How do you go mad? How do you not go mad?” So, I read this every time I open my computer to work on my book, and you know, Maira is right.