The 2002 song Johnny Cash wanted to be his final message: “That was great”
Johnny Cash has always been the kind of artist who seems like more myth than man.
Whenever anyone talks about working with him these days, they have talked about feeling like they were in the presence of greatness, and even when looking at his biography, a lot of his own personal problems feel like something that was ripped out of some old western from the 1950s. That was how ‘The Man in Black’ always presented himself, but Rick Rubin was the one who was constantly trying to see what else the country legend could do with a guitar in his hands.
Because if you look at history, Cash was dangerously close to becoming a punchline before Rubin began working with him. ‘The Man in Black’ persona had been gone and replaced with pastel colours, and even if The Highwaymen did give him a little bit more swagger as a legacy artist, it did make him sound a little bit more middle-aged than he wanted to. So when Rubin started working on songs with him, he wanted everyone to see the legend again.
American Recordings was certainly a start for that kind of music, but the entire American series of albums was just about trying to bring Cash back to his roots. He was still a viable artist, and he wanted the chance to try on some new sounds that no one had heard before. And that usually meant finding songs well outside his genre and finding the best way to twist it on its head.
No one would have imagined that he would try his hand at singing songs by U2, Soundgarden, or Depeche Mode, but Cash didn’t care about the pedigree that these artists had beforehand. His version of ‘Hurt’ by Nine Inch Nails might have sounded strange on paper, but when you listen to the way that he delivers every single line, Cash was able to take this simple song about someone’s descent into addiction and add just a little bit of musical sunshine by playing it on an acoustic guitar.
But by the time that American IV was coming out, Cash knew that he had reached the end of the line in many respects. He was sick during the making of a lot of Rubin’s records, but he was never going to let it affect his spirit whenever he sang. His versions of ‘In My Life’ and ‘Personal Jesus’ are absolutely beautiful, but if this was going to be the last thing he was going to see come out, he wanted ‘We’ll Meet Again’ to be the memory that everyone had of him.
There were plenty more albums in the backlog that would be released after his passing, but ‘We’ll Meet Again’ is the kind of sombre farewell that Cash needed to hear, with Rubin recalling, “He wanted everyone singing on the end of that song that’s at the end of American IV. And he thought ‘We’ll Meet Again’, and hearing all those voices was important for him to happen.”
Adding, “So we did that, and then it wasn’t until we had the discussion that American IV is finished, and it’s coming out, where he shook my hand and said, ‘You know, we had a great run, and that was great and thank you.’”
And going back to his roots like this is a lot of what American IV was all about. In between him covering tunes that fit his style the best, hearing him sing updates of some of his biggest songs like ‘Give My Love to Rose’ is downright heartbreaking, especially coming from the perspective of an old man telling his wife and son to keep going on with their lives and remember how much he loves them.
But even for an album that had a modern edge, ‘We’ll Meet Again’ was closer to the kind of music that Cash had always wanted to make. He seemed to have a sixth sense that this song would be the last that he would ever release during his lifetime, and even if he had a fair amount of ugliness throughout his life, he knew that he wanted to go out smiling, just like he always did.
