‘The Strange Case of Frank Cash and the Morning Paper’: The greatest narrative song you’ve never heard
Frank Cash is an ordinary man, living an ordinary life, who gets to live out a fantasy that every ordinary person has always dreamed of… until things inevitably go awry. In a world of tired love songs and over-harvested laments, the little-known T Bone Burnett classic, ‘The Strange Case of Frank Cash and the Morning Paper’, is a record that history has wrongfully regarded – you shouldn’t make that same mistake.
The crooked story he crafts is thus: Frank Cash is a gambler down on his luck, laying low after building up debt. Sheltering in a place down on “lonely street”, he begins to get the morning paper delivered to his door while he rifles through the classifieds. One morning, he is struck by a strange occurrence when the paper appears to have printed next week’s football scores.
He watches on with amazement as these scores come to fruition, and concludes that a wealthy future has surely befallen him. He places “ten grand he [doesn’t] have on the Jets”. Once again, the mystic paper’s scores come to fruition. Cash keeps cashing in, and a lavish lifestyle awaits. But when he moves to a house “on the lake” – not ‘by the lake’, but actually on the lake – the paper delivered to his door “had ceased to prognosticate”.
You see, Cash might have gotten lucky, but this did little to improve his hindsight, and he soon realised that obviously not every morning paper in circulation is capable of the same mystic misprint, so he races to his old address to inquire about the heralding Herald. The new tenant is cagey. Clearly struck by the same dumb luck, he refuses to hand over the paper and brandishes a gun.
The next time we hear of Cash, he is in court, having killed this beligerent new tenant in a surreal stand-off. This moment proves to be Burnett’s literary masterstroke. Suddenly, we get to hear from Cash in the first person, and he proclaims to the jury:
“Your honour and ladies and gentlemen of the jury,
All this has been happening to me because of this guy named T Bone Burnett,
He’s been making all this up,
And I just want to say, ‘I don’t believe in him,
In fact, I don’t even think he exists,
And not only that, but this song is over...‘”
After a comical pause, the track continues, and Cash’s fictional life rolls on beyond his control as though Burnett is God, which, of course, in many ways, he is. Therein lies the brilliant depth to an otherwise comic and novel track. It might not have the greatest melody, and Burnett has certainly been part of classier productions over the years, but no other song in history has broken the fourth wall, deftly deviated between third and first-person narrative, posed questions about fate, destiny, and omnipotent design, breached postmodernist structuring, and offered up plenty of chuckles in the process.
While the song may have some of the hallmarks of Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel, Breakfast of Champions, nobody else has managed to transform something so literary into a little five-minute song. Within that run-time, it asks:
- If there is a God, can we really have free will?
- If fictional characters are aware of their own fictionality, do they remain fictional?
- Is Burnett unjust or just arbitrary?
- Does anything ever truly end?
- Does money made carelessly lead to carelessness?
- Did Cash ever truly enjoy his cash?
- Is Cash a pawn to the paper, or the paper a pawn in Cash’s life?
- If the football scores were already forecast, was the same true of Cash’s trial?
- Why do so few people know this song?
- Is this the most philosophically dense song ever written?
The latter is certainly the easiest to answer: put it this way, did Brat leave you seeking the advice of a theologian?
