Storytelling

It is a rare post here at this blog that doesn't concentrate specifically on some level of the literary world, but this will be one of those posts.

My musical tastes run a bit across the map at times, and having hit the age of 40, I've had the "pleasure" of being pointed to in lines at stores with CD's in my hands by much younger people questioning what in the world is he buying that (be it Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins, Sufjan Stevens, Wolfmother, or even Dane Cook) for (my personal favorite being, "Hey look, that old guy is buying Dane Cook too!").

And while I'm still probably a little too familiar with louder bands like Breaking Benjamin, and even the aforementioned Wolfmother, and veer occasionally into listening to rap, and find the odd country artist (well, is Dwight Yoakum really that odd, he's really the only one sliding in to that category), and I still enjoy listening to many bands of the 80's such as The Cure, The Pixies, The Replacements, REM, Rainmakers, etc., what I tend to find myself returning to over and over, are individuals and bands that get lumped into the singer-songwriter category. 

I think the reason for this is that I find the songs from these people or bands to be like little stories.  And while I have a hard time keeping up on the comings and goings of the music industry (I really kind of had to choose between literary and music as television takes up WAY too much of my time), I do try to ferret out new things every once in a while.

This time, however, I didn't ferret out something new so much as really old.  I happened to be in a Best Buy the day the new, and possibly (probably?  hopefully?) last Johnny Cash album came out.  American V:  A Hundred Highways.  While I can't find them all anymore, I've either bought, or borrowed each of the previous 4 in the American Recordings series, in which Rick Rubin has produced Johnny Cash.  I'd enjoyed them all and realized when I saw this that it was something I'd probably want to listen to.

I listened to it once or twice, semi-distractedly while at work, and then last weekend had the opportunity to listen to it nearly twice straight through while on a long drive.  I happened to hear one of the earlier American Recordings as well this past Saturday and then have listened to V again about a dozen times this week and believe I might actually be on to something with the idea of storytelling.

While Cash only wrote two of the twelve songs on this CD, the way he performs the other ten, the emotions, or weariness, or events that the listener may know occured in his life just prior to the songs being recorded, all had an affect on my listening to the lyrics.  The weakness in his voice in the opener as he asks God for help (Help Me), or the additional power his voice seems to have in the next number, God's Gonna Cut You Down.  While he covers Gordon Lightfoot's song, If You Could Read My Mind, knowing that his own wife had recently passed away prior to the recording led me to listen to it with a completely different meaning than I ever had heard Lightfoot sing his own words with.  The CD itself is fantastic, and I believe a great deal of my enjoyment comes from this ability of Cash to make the words he sings become a little story, wrapped up in song.

Comments

[Justin]

I was thinking about this the other day when listening to American V. I think one of Cash's greatest assests in that he can take someone else's song and inhabit it so fully as to make it his own and to make it believable. And one recent albums he's done it without that glorious voice of his in full flower, making it that much more remarkable (or maybe underscoring his true artistry).