November 1 , 2005
Columbia Album Catalog Restoration
EXPANDED EDITIONS OF SEVEN YEAR ACHE (1981),
KING’S RECORD SHOP (1987), AND INTERIORS (1990),
PLUS A NEW COLLECTION SPANNING 1979-2003,
THE VERY BEST OF ROSANNE CASH
BONUS TRACKS INCLUDE
PREVIOUSLY UNRELEASED LIVE TRACKS AND STUDIO RECORDINGS, DEMO AND B-SIDE MATERIAL, AND MORE
New liner notes written by veteran journalists Chet Flippo,
Geoffrey Himes, Anthony DeCurtis, and Alanna Nash, respectively
The Very Best of Rosanne Cash features Johnny Cash’s final vocal duet,
“September When It Comes”
All four titles arrive in stores November 1st on Columbia/Legacy
New Rosanne album on Capitol Records,
Black Cadillac, set for January 24th release
“Rosanne Cash’s career was a touchstone over the years of the shifting attitudes of the national audience and media to country music and Nashville artists. She was an agent of change in that shift. During her reign, that attitude changed gradually from one of often-outright hostility or ridicule to one of a gradual understanding, followed by an embrace. Her thoughtful approach to the country music ideal and central theme – that of music centered on the verities of everyday life and its ultimate goals and values – focused attention on country music’s strengths and possibilities.”
– Chet Flippo, from his liner notes to the new
expanded edition of SEVEN YEAR ACHE
Twenty five years after the release of her first album on Columbia Records – which debuted on the C&W charts one week after her 25th birthday – Rosanne Cash can reflect upon one of the most prolific and influential careers in music. The first decade and a half of that career, encompassing seven unique studio albums (and her first ‘Hits’ package), took place at Columbia Records, where Rosanne’s tumultuous life and times played out on the world stage for everyone to witness – ups, downs and in-betweens.
Scheduled to arrive in stores November 1st on Columbia/Legacy, a division of SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT, are newly remastered expanded editions – each with bonus tracks and newly commissioned liner notes essays – of three studio albums from divergent times in Rosanne’s career, plus a brand new collection. These four titles comprise:
[on sale at Sony Music Store]
[on sale at Sony Music Store]
[on sale at Sony Music Store]
[on sale at Sony Music Store]
The four albums precede the scheduled release on January 24, 2006, of Rosanne’s third album for Capitol Records, entitled Black Cadillac. The new studio album is dedicated to her father Johnny Cash (who died on September 12, 2003), her stepmother June Carter Cash (who died on May 15, 2003), and her mother (Johnny’s first wife) Vivian Liberto (who died on the day of Rosanne’s 50th birthday, May 24, 2005).
Each one of the albums includes new liner notes by writers who’ve followed Rosanne’s career since she first emerged on the scene in the late-1970s. Chet Flippo (SEVEN YEAR ACHE), CMT.com editorial director and a former editor at Rolling Stone and Billboard, is a veteran journalist and author of many books on rock and country music, including Your Cheatin’ Heart: A Biography of Hank Williams (1981), It's Only Rock 'n Roll: My on-the-Road Adventures with the Rolling Stones (1989), and Everybody Was Kung-Fu Dancing: Chronicles of the Lionized and the Notorious, Vol. 1 (1991). Geoffrey Himes (KING'S RECORD SHOP) writes for the Washington Post, New Country magazine, and the Oxford American, among others.
Rolling Stone contributing editor Anthony DeCurtis (INTERIORS) has written liner notes on a variety of artists ranging from Tony Bennett, the Beach Boys and Buddy Guy, to Junior Kimbrough , Talking Heads, and Simon & Garfunkel. Alanna Nash (THE VERY BEST OF ROSANNE CASH), another veteran journalist and author, was the winner of the 2004 CMA Media Achievement Award, and the 2004 Belmont Book Award for The Colonel: The Extraordinary Story of Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley.
Background: Rosanne Cash was born in Memphis on May 24, 1955, two months after Johnny recorded his first sides with Sam Phillips at Sun Records (with “Hey Porter”), and the same month he recorded his second sessions (with “Cry, Cry, Cry”). Three summers later, following his signing to Columbia, Johnny used his advance funds to move his family to the Los Angeles suburb of Ventura, where Rosanne grew up as the daughter of one of popular music’s most volatile and idiosyncratic figures. When she was 11, her parents divorced and Rosanne was raised in the Valley by her single mom.
After high school graduation in 1973, she joined Johnny’s touring road show, beginning as a ‘wardrobe assistant’ (doing laundry!) and gradually making a transition to performing as a backup singer and occasional soloist. Rosanne learned “from watching her father on stage every night,” Nash writes, “and from sitting at the feet of step-grandmother Maybelle Carter and the matriarch’s daughters Helen, Anita, and June, who taught her songs as they waited to go on for the finale. She mixed that influence with the British pop of the Beatles and the Southern California rock of Buffalo Springfield, and knew she wanted to be a songwriter.”
After three years on the road, however, Rosanne chose to move to London, where she worked as a secretary at CBS Records and traveled in Europe. Returning to the U.S. in 1977, she thought she might become an actress, and enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in Hollywood for a year. On a trip to Germany in December 1978, Ariola Records requested a demo. Rosanne knew Rodney Crowell, “the Houston-born singer-songwriter and rhythm guitarist who had just left Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band,” Nash goes on, “who had contributed some of the most memorable songs to Harris’s groundbreaking records, with their organic synthesis of country, rock, and folk.”
The demo was recorded in January 1978, and led to a full album with Ariola. Though it has never surfaced in America, the LP was sufficient for Johnny to bring to CBS Records Nashville and get his daughter a deal with Columbia. Rosanne had begun playing out with Rodney’s new band, the Cherry Bombs, when they were wed in 1979, and started working on the first Columbia LP in Nashville. Rosanne’s actual U.S. chart debut was September 1979, when her duet with Bobby Bare on the Crowell composition “No Memories Hangin’ Round” (from the upcoming album) hit the C&W chart. The LP, Right Or Wrong, was released in early 1980, and sent up two respectable top 25 chart entries, “Couldn't Do Nothing Right” (written by Karen Brooks and Gary P. Nunn) and “Take Me Take Me” (by Keith Sykes, who also wrote the album title tune). Rosanne was unable to do much touring, though, because she was pregnant with the first of her three children with Rodney. Still, the album was a critical and (semi-)commercial success, and set the stage for her real breakthrough the following year.
SEVEN YEAR ACHE
Rosanne’s second Columbia LP broke every rule – it was a rock-influenced album as Chet Flippo emphasizes, that didn’t rely exclusively on Nashville songwriters for its tunes, and was recorded in Los Angeles with studio musicians (including Booker T. Jones, Albert Lee, Tony Brown) augmenting her and Rodney’s band the Cherry Bombs (including guitarists Hank DeVito and Jerry McGee, bassist Emory Gordy, and drummer Larrie Londin). Beyond that, it was in the right place at the right time, and positioned Rosanne as THE new voice at a critical juncture – the mainstreaming of punk rock’s ethical rejection of corporate pop coming head-to-head with the aging crossover of Nashville underground’s ‘outlaw country’ movement. 26-year old Rosanne was savvy and rocked, yet was grounded in the traditionalism she inherited from her father, and it all came out on SEVEN YEAR ACHE.
An album is only as good as its songs, and SEVEN YEAR ACHE’s trifecta of #1 C&W hits took off with Rosanne’s original title tune, which resonated with the new demographic of radio listeners as it gradually rose to the top of the chart 13 weeks after its debut. The second single, songwriter Leroy Preston’s “My Baby Thinks He’s a Train” (the first of many ‘train’ songs that have populated Rosanne’s discography) took 10 weeks to build up to #1, followed by another Rosanne original, “Blue Moon With Heartache” (12 weeks to #1). But Rosanne and Rodney had crafted an album with no filler, as evidenced by the balance of the tracks: Keith Sykes’ “Rainin’” and “Only Human,” Steve Forbert’s “What Kinda Girl,” Merle Haggard/Red Simpson’s “You Don’t Have Very Far to Go,” the Crickets’ Glen D. Hardin/Sonny Curtis song “Where Will the Words Come From,” Tom Petty’s “Hometown Blues,” and the Hank DeVito/Rodney Crowell song “Can’t Resist.” The LP reached #1 in June 1981, three months into its 14 month reign on the C&W chart. The two previously unreleased bonus tracks on this expanded edition include “The Feeling” (from the original sessions); and a live 1993 tour-band version (with Rosanne’s future husband John Leventhal on guitar and backing vocals, and future Bob Dylan guitarist Larry Campbell) of “Seven Year Ache.”
SEVEN YEAR ACHE by ROSANNE CASH
(Columbia/Legacy CK 86997, originally issued in March 1981, as Columbia 36965)
Selections: 1. Rainin’ • 2. Seven Year Ache (C&W #1) • 3. Blue Moon With Heartache (C&W #1) • 4. What Kinda Girl? • 5. You Don’t Have Very Far To Go • 6. My Baby Thinks He’s A Train (C&W #1) • 7. Only Human • 8. Where Will The Words Come From? • 9. Hometown Blues • 10. I Can’t Resist
Bonus tracks: 11. The Feeling (previously unreleased, from the original album recording sessions) • 12. Seven Year Ache (previously unreleased, live in Boulder, CO, July 17, 1993, on the “E-Town” radio show).
KING'S RECORD SHOP
After the wildly successful SEVEN YEAR ACHE, Rosanne and Rodney returned to Nashville to record 1982’s Somewhere In the Stars. The former turned out to be a hard act to follow – the latter did not reach #1, nor did any of its singles (“Ain’t No Money,” “I Wonder,” and “It Hasn’t Happened Yet”). A three-year childbearing hiatus ensued, including the embattled year-long process of recording the Rhythm & Romance LP outside of Nashville, and mostly with an outside producer. Despite its radical power-pop shift, the album spun off consecutive #1 hits (the Grammy Award-winning “I Don’t Know Why You Don’t Want Me,” “Never Be You”), another pair in the top 5 (“Hold On,” “Second To No One”), and convincingly returned Rosanne to the #1 album spot, the start of a 72-week stay on the chart through 1985-86.
For her next album Rosanne returned to Nashville and Rodney returned to the producer’s chair, with a roots-rock grounded concept hinging on three songs, as Rosanne told Geoff Himes: John Hiatt’s “The Way We Make a Broken Heart” (which turned out to be the first #1 hit), the Sun-flavored cover of her father Johnny’s old “Tennessee Flat Top Box” (the second #1, featuring Randy Scruggs on guitar), and Rosanne’s original “The Real Me.” It was one of several songs on the album that detonated the taboo issue (in Nashville and C&W circles) of female empowerment, along with Eliza Gilkyson’s “Rosie Strike Back” and Rodney’s “I Don’t Have To Crawl.” The nature of a woman’s vulnerability was also given voice on two Rosanne originals, “Somewhere Sometime” and “If You Change Your Mind” (the third #1, co-written with Hank DeVito) and pianist Benmont Tench’s (of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers) “Why Don’t You Quit Leaving Me Alone.” The metaphor of “a marital crisis that is quickly careening out of control,” as Himes describes John Stewart’s “Runaway Train” (the fourth #1, which set a C&W chart record for female artists) further distanced Rosanne from the Nashville establishment.
Though KING'S RECORD SHOP missed the top spot (peaking at #6), it stayed on the C&W chart for two years (103 weeks), a time in which Randy Travis and George Strait had a virtual stranglehold on the chart. Bonus tracks on this expanded edition include “707” written by Memphis English professor John Kilzer (who wrote “Green, Yellow And Red”) which was the non-album B-side of “The Way We Make A Broken Heart”; and previously unreleased live tour-band versions (with Leventhal and Campbell) of “Runaway Train” in 1991, and “Green, Yellow And Red” in 1993.
KING'S RECORD SHOP by ROSANNE CASH
(Columbia/Legacy CK 86994, originally issued in July 1987, as Columbia 40777)
Selections: 1. Rosie Strike Back • 2. The Way We Make A Broken Heart (C&W #1) • 3. If You Change Your Mind (C&W #1) • 4. The Real Me • 5. Somewhere Sometime • 6. Runaway Train (C&W #1) • 7. Tennessee Flat Top Box (C&W #1) • 8. I Don’t Have To Crawl • 9. Green, Yellow And Red • 10. Why Don’t You Quit Leaving Me Alone
Bonus tracks: 11. 707 (single B-side; also released on Rosanne Cash – Retrospective, CK 67321, 1995) • 12. Runaway Train (previously unreleased, live in Toronto, April 3, 1991, on CBC radio’s “Hot Ticket”) • 13. Green, Yellow And Red (previously unreleased, live in Boulder, CO, July 17, 1993, on the “E-Town” radio show).
INTERIORS
After the release of KING'S RECORD SHOP, with its ensuing chart-run and tour support, another relatively lengthy hiatus took place, interrupted only by Hits 1979-1989. Among its dozen tunes were eight (of her 11) #1 C&W hits, including a brand new cover of the Beatles’ “I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party,” Rosanne’s final #1 (or top 30 hit, for that matter), and a bittersweet portent of things to come. In the midst of her marriage to Rodney Crowell disintegrating by degrees, the songs that Rosanne was writing in 1989 and 1990 were painful portraits of disillusion and betrayal, stoked by a weary anger for which there was no cure. She laid bare her soul on INTERIORS, an album whose ten songs she wrote (or co-wrote) and produced (or co-produced) during a time when she seemed unable to extricate herself from the aching loneliness and dysfunction that surrounded her, which ultimately resulted in her divorce from Rodney in 1992.
Within her emotional unraveling, however, Rosanne created an album that spoke to her most faithful listeners (who sent it up as far as #23, for a half-year stay on the C&W album chart), even if it totally spooked the C&W powers-that-be at radio and tv. In fact, the album is a confessional song-cycle, from the opening “On The Inside” to the haunting closer, “Paralyzed,” a beautifully demonic piece set off by the arco contrabass of Edgar Meyer, the violin of Mark O’Connor (who plays throughout the album), and John Jarvis on piano and keyboards. “Dance With The Tiger” was co-written with John Stewart (whose “Runaway Train” was an early storm warning three years prior). Most amazing is Rodney’s presence – as the co-writer of “Real Woman” and singing with Rosanne in “On The Surface” and “What We Really Want.” A promotional CD of the album included two extra tracks, the hopeful “Portrait” (co-written with Keith Sykes, whose “Right Or Wrong” gave Rosanne’s first Columbia LP its title); and the epical “All Come True” (a favorite from World Party’s debut album in 1987). Two more previously unreleased bonus tracks fill out this expanded edition, a live tour-band version (with Leventhal and Campbell) of “This World” from 1991, and an acoustic demo-sounding version of “What We Really Want.”
INTERIORS by ROSANNE CASH
(Columbia/Legacy CK 93655, originally issued in October 1990, as Columbia 46079)
Selections: 1. On The Inside • 2. Dance With The Tiger • 3. On The Surface • 4. Real Woman • 5. This World • 6. What We Really Want • 7. Mirror Image • 8. Land Of Nightmares • 9. I Want A Cure • 10. Paralyzed •
Bonus tracks: 11. Portrait • 12. All Come True (tracks 11-12 from promotional CD Interiors: The Full Sessions, CAS 2182) • 13. This World (previously unreleased, live in Toronto, April 3, 1991, on CBC radio’s “Hot Ticket”) • 14. What We Really Want (previously unreleased, acoustic, recording date and location unknown).
THE VERY BEST OF ROSANNE CASH
This collection, characterized by Alanna Nash’s liner notes as “visionary and uncompromising,” eclipses the previous Columbia packages – 1989’s Hits 1979-1989 and 1995’s Retrospective – in several ways other than just the sheer number of its tracks, and the fact that it is the first new remastering of many of these songs in a decade. Ten of the 16 tracks are solid chart hits without which any Rosanne Cash anthology would be considered incomplete, including six #1’s. The balance is an inspired program of original compositions from Rosanne’s three most recent albums (which yielded no C&W chart singles), namely her final Columbia album, 1993’s The Wheel (“The Wheel,” “Sleeping In Paris,” and “Seventh Avenue”); and her first two Capitol albums, 1996’s 10 Song Demo (“Western Wall”) and 2003’s Rules Of Travel (“September When It Comes” featuring Johnny Cash). Finally, there is the previously unreleased alternate version of “Never Be You” (from the 1985 Rhythm & Romance sessions), co-written by Benmont Tench and Tom Petty, and featuring Tench on piano and Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch.
THE VERY BEST OF ROSANNE CASH
(Columbia/Legacy CK 86996)
Selections: 1. The Wheel (F) • 2. The Way We Make A Broken Heart (D, C&W #1) • 3. Seven Year Ache (B, C&W #1) • 4. Hold On (C, C&W #5) • 5. On The Surface (E, C&W #69) • 6. No Memories Hangin’ Around (w/Bobby Bare) (A, C&W #17) • 7. My Baby Thinks He’s A Train (B, C&W #1) • 8. I Don’t Know Why You Don’t Want Me (C, C&W #1) • 9. Blue Moon With Heartache (B, C&W #1) • 10. Western Wall (G) • 11. Tennessee Flat Top Box (D, C&W #1) • 12. September When It Comes (feat. Johnny Cash) (H) • 13. Sleeping In Paris (F) • 14. Never Be You (C, previously unreleased alternate version) • 15. What We Really Want (E, C&W #39) • 16. Seventh Avenue (F).
Album key:
A – from Right Or Wrong (Columbia 36155, released 1980).
B – from Seven Year Ache (Columbia 36965, released 1981).
C – from Rhythm & Romance (Columbia 39463, released 1985).
D – from King’s Record Shop (Columbia 40777, released 1988).
E – from Interiors (Columbia 46079, released 1990).
F – from The Wheel (Columbia 52729, released 1993).
G – from 10 Song Demo (Capitol 32390, released 1996).
H – from Rules Of Travel (Capitol 37757, released 2003).
For further information on ROSANNE CASH contact:
Tom Cording at Legacy Media Relations, 212.833.4448, or Randy Haecker at Legacy Media Relations, 212.833.4101
Email: LegacyMediaRelations@sonymusic.co