Rosanne Cash has always been a private person. She lives her life quietly in New York with her husband and children, occasionally recording a new album and touring.
So it's rather astonishing that she's penned
Composed (Viking, $26.95), a memoir in which she digs into the memories and experiences that got her to where she is today—an accomplished singer-songwriter who grew up in the shadow of her famous father, Johnny Cash, and managed to always do it her way.
In addition to her songwriting, Cash also has written a children's book, short stories and essays. Here she finds the beginnings of her voice as a memoirist, a literal voice that is perhaps a little too composed.
So as expected,
Composed is not a tell-all, revealing family secrets and such. Instead, Cash offers a series of musings in which she sheds light on universal life experiences: love, loss, loneliness, motherhood and health challenges.
Her ramblings are honest, touching and quietly revealing. She writes of her childhood and her relationships with her mother, Vivian, and famous stepmother, June Carter Cash. Her personal and professional relationship with her father was complicated.
Cash was always uneasy with the fact that she was born into country music royalty. If she was going to join the ranks as a singer-songwriter, she would blaze her own trail, never riding on her iconic father's coattails.
She writes: "I have built my career with my eyes half closed and both parents held at arm's length, for opposite reasons: My father was too close to what I wanted to do; my mother too distant."
After her parents divorced, Cash grew up mostly in Southern California. At 18, she hit the road with her father (it was here that he created The List—100 important American songs — that was the inspiration for her latest album).
She spent some time working for a record label in London (her musings on this are real and funny) and recorded her first album in Europe. Eventually, working her way back to Nashville, she began working with Rodney Crowell, whom she would later marry, becoming the reigning couple of Nashville's singer-songwriter community.
During her time with Crowell (they are now divorced), Cash saw her greatest success with the albums "Seven Year Ache" and "King's Record Shop."
Yet there are days of aching loneliness and frustration as she strives to become a solid songwriter "driven by a deep love and obsession with language, poetry, and melody."
Cash is straightforward about the very serious brain surgery that threatened her life. It required a "steely, aggressive sense of humor."
Cash, who is married to producer/guitarist John Leventhal, has traveled a long, sometimes unsettling, trail to come into her own as a performer, daughter, wife and mother to her five children. With this thoughtful memoir, she reveals how she managed it all and in the doing wrote her own distinctive chapter in the Cash legacy.
