New Johnny Cash Album, ‘Songwriter,’ Brings to Light 11 Original Compositions He Recorded but Never Released in 1993
variety.comChris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic More than 20 years after his death, there are treasures in the Johnny Cash vault that have remained unmined, despite assumptions that everything interesting might have been brought into the light in the posthumous recordings that came out in the years following his 2003 death.
On June 28, Universal Music will issue “Songwriter,” a collection of 11 previously unreleased recordings that Cash demo-ed in 1993, all of them self-penned originals.
These original compositions make for an intriguing find, given that the country legend was a revered songwriter when he set his mind to it, yet he primarily relied on outside material throughout his career.
Only two of the 11 self-written songs in the set were ever re-recorded and released in any form: “Drive On” and “Like a Soldier,” which appeared in different form on the first album Rick Rubin produced for Cash, “American Recordings.” In some ways, the material on the forthcoming Mercury Nashville/UMe release can be considered as a sort of dry run for the American label albums with Rubin that were to come, as Cash considered his next moves between his Mercury and American label tenures, even though most of these songs got set aside when the approach for the Rubin albums turned to focusing primarily on covering well-known rock songs.
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