Roseanne Cash Finishing Album Based On "Dad's List"

With a musical lineage unlike any other artist in country music history, Roseanne Cash been part of the fabric of Nashville music since birth. It was excitement that we read a letter sent out to "her friends" about an upcoming project that is very much attached to her father, Johnny...

"I have begun a new record, which will hopefully be delivered to my lovely and intelligent label, Manhattan Records, in March, and will hopefully reach your digital download service by Fall. I was going to say it would reach your ‘record store’, but I didn’t want you to think I was time-traveling from another century. (Oh, what WILL happen to the major label paradigm and compact discs? Did you know that vinyl is outselling cds these days?)

The record. When I was 18 years old, my father became alarmed that I appeared to lack a deep and thorough understanding of country music (having been Beatles obsessed for my entire youth) and he made me a list of songs. At the top, he scrawled ‘100 Essential Country Songs’ and he gave a lot of thought to which songs comprised that one hundred. He told me that this list was my education, and said I should learn all the songs. I did. And it WAS an education.
I am making a record based on The List.

It is a profound pleasure and honor to sing these songs. I’m not doing the entire one hundred, but Mr. L and I are carefully culling the ones which seem best suited to my voice and sensibility. I’ve never done anything like this, and it is so liberating and so affirming of everything I’ve written and recorded to this point. You might not think that would be the case, as I am a songwriter, and have defined myself that way for my entire adult life, but this project ties all the threads together—past and future, legacy and youth, tradition, timelessness and the pull of the unknown. If my father had been a martial arts master, he might have passed a martial arts ‘secret’ on to me, his oldest child. If he had been a surgeon, he might have taken me into his operating room and pointed out the arteries and organs. If he were a robber baron, he might have surveyed his empire and said, ‘Honey, some day this will all be yours!’. But he was a musician and a songwriter, and he gave me The List.

Look for The List, possibly at your favorite RECORD STORE, later this year."