American Recordings (album)

Background

Cash was approached by producer Rick Rubin and offered a contract with Rubin's American Recordings label, better known for rap and heavy metal than for country music. Under Rubin's supervision, he recorded the album in his living room, accompanied only by his guitar. For years Cash had often been at odds with his producers after he had discovered with his first producer, Sam Phillips, that his voice was better suited to a stripped-down musical style. Most famously he disagreed with Jack Clement over his sound, Clement having tried to give Cash's songs a "twangy" feel and to add strings and barbershop-quartet-style singers, and his successful collaboration with Rick Rubin was in part due to Rubin seeking a minimalist sound for his songs.

The songs "Tennessee Stud" and "The Man Who Couldn't Cry" were recorded live at the Viper Room, a Sunset Strip, Los Angeles nightclub owned at the time by Johnny Depp. "The Beast in Me" was written and originally recorded by Cash's former stepson-in-law Nick Lowe. Glenn Danzig wrote "Thirteen" specifically for Cash in less than twenty minutes. The album cover was photographed whilst Cash was visiting Australia, at Werribee near Melbourne.

Release and reception

American Recordings was released on April 26, 1994, to widespread acclaim from critics. Q magazine deemed it the year's most sincere and ambitious record, while NME found it "uplifting and life affirming because the message is taught through adversity, ill luck and fighting for survival". David Browne, writing in Entertainment Weekly, said Cash remained a captivating singer throughout the austerely arranged country ballads and bizarre reflections, calling the record "his most relaxed and folkiest album in three decades". In a rave review for Rolling Stone, Anthony DeCurtis hailed it as one of Cash's greatest albums because of his self-possessed, "biblically intense" take on traditional folk songs and Rubin's no-frills production: "American Recordings is at once monumental and viscerally intimate, fiercely true to the legend of Johnny Cash and entirely contemporary." Mark Cooper from Mojo called it a "breathtaking blend of the confessional and the self-mythologising". In the Chicago Tribune, Greg Kot wrote that Cash's singing was effectively dramatic throughout "the quagmire of humor and bloodshed, pathos and treachery evoked by these songs", while Los Angeles Times critic Randy Lewis said they "peer into the dark corners of the American soul" on what was a "milestone work" for Cash.

In a negative review for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau felt American Recordings had been overhyped by antisocial sycophants and lacked the vital shuffle beat of Cash's best music, citing "Delia's Gone" and perhaps "Thirteen" as "the only time words and voice combine with the undeniable seniority his claque claims to hear everywhere". In retrospect, AllMusic's Mark Deming wrote that the album "became a critical sensation and a commercial success, though it was overrated in some quarters simply because it reminded audiences that one of America's greatest musical talents was still capable of making compelling music, something he had never stopped doing even if no one bothered to listen."

At the end of 1994, American Recordings was voted the seventh best album of the year in the Pazz & Jop, an annual poll of American critics nationwide. In other year-end lists, it was ranked 36th by Select, 23rd by NME, 19th by Rockdelux, 17th by Les Inrockuptibles, 15th by The Face, 5th by the Los Angeles Times, 4th by Mojo, and 2nd by OOR. At the 1995 Grammy Awards, it won Cash a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Rolling Stone later placed the record at number 366 on the magazine's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time" list.

Track listing

Personnel