The album Johnny Cash thought was too sad to release: “Mournful”
During the historic live album At Folsom Prison, Johnny Cash enraptured a gaggle of inmates with cheeky renditions of the jokey ‘Dirty Old Egg-Suckin Dog’ and ‘Flushed from the Bathroom of your Heart’. From the hooting and the hollering captured in the back of the recording, the prisoners went wild for it, cheering and laughing in equal measure.
By these standards, one might come to expect the same free-wheeling, happy-go-lucky attitude from the star across his discography. After all, a man who can sing the lyrics “In the garbage disposal of your dreams I’ve been ground up, dear” must be at least a bit of a jocular optimist, surely?
As the new millennium finally settled, Cash found himself turning inward more than ever, the toilet jokes and foot-stomping laughter a thing of the past, and instead, while making the 2002 record, American IV: The Man Comes Around, Cash gets dark and moody, which the public ate right up since the album eventually went gold.
Across tracks like a biblically interpreted cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, or a world-renowned version of the Nine Inch Nails’ song ‘Hurt’ full of raw pain and angst, Cash experimented with a new kind of ragged emotion, an all-encompassing pain with sharp edges and shadows hidden from view.
The album was the fourth in a run with his producer, Rick Rubin, who, by that point, knew exactly what to do to make Cash’s golden lungs chime; across the record, there’s a new openness, a recognition that cracks and slurs can bring out the mercurial belly of pain more than perfection might be able to. During the recording process, this was a fact that scared Cash.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, the singer-songwriter confessed, “At one point, I said to Rick, ‘We’re really getting sad and mournful with this album,'” which highlighted that this made Cash uncomfortable, like driving in the dark with no headlights on, but Rubin had a perfect response for the star.
Cash went on, “And he said, ‘Not depression-sad, just sad for the sake of sadness.’ After that, I thought, you know, if that’s what’s coming, let’s go for it.” Gone were the worries that the music was too drowsy or mopey.
Instead, the pair leaned into the pain, and out came an awe-inspiring take on entirely genius lyrics like: “I hurt myself today to see if I still feel. I focus on the pain, the only thing that’s real.”
This sadness was an eerie prognostication of things soon to come for Cash. The following year, his wife, June Carter Cash, would pass away. Not four months later, with a mountain of hurt in his heart, Cash would also pass away, from complications related to diabetes, with Cash singing on the album, “everyone I know goes away in the end,” it almost seems, in hindsight, that he might have been singing that to his reflection, too.
