"Hello out there, this is planet Earth..."  If planet Earth indeed had a voice, it might well have sounded like that of John R. Cash: deep, resonant, impactful.  Those lyrics open "Hello Out There," the first track on Songwriter, the new, posthumous release from the late troubadour (1932-2003) - the fifth such collection to arrive since his death.  It's been released by UMe and Mercury Nashville, in essence adding one more album to his Mercury discography which spanned 1986-1991. The Mercury branding makes sense, as the original vocal recordings heard on Songwriter were laid down in Nashville sometime in the early 1990s, before Cash's career experienced a wholesale jolt with the release of the first volume of his Rick Rubin-produced series on, and of, American Recordings.

The period was a fraught one for Cash.  After Columbia Records (his home since 1958) had dropped the venerable artist from the label in 1986, Mercury was quick to snap him up.  But when his Mercury tenure ended, another major label wasn't so quick to sign the American legend.  Plans for a theatre in Branson, Missouri - where Cash's longtime Columbia labelmate Andy Williams was setting up shop with his own venue - fell through, and The Man in Black was musically adrift.  It's still unclear why he entered Nashville's LSI Studios to record the eleven original songs on Songwriter; it couldn't have hurt that his stepdaughter owned the studio.  Were these demos or intended for an album?  Whatever the reason, Cash likely knew he still had much to offer, even if it would take Rick Rubin to rediscover qualities in his music that even the artist had likely forgotten.  Rubin emphasized the stark, deep melancholy at the heart of Cash's oeuvre, stripping away the often-gentle, even corny humor and sweet sentimentality that nonetheless informed many of his Columbia albums.  Songwriter is an altogether lighter album than those American Recordings, but that doesn't make it less worthwhile as a portrait of the artist in his thankfully-short wilderness years.

For this album, Cash's original vocal tracks - uniformly robust and commanding, and not at all weathered in the mode of the late American Recordings - have been accompanied by new backing tracks.  Johnny and June Carter Cash's son John Carter Cash (who played rhythm guitar on the original sessions), engineer David Ferguson (a close associate of the elder Cash since the early 1980s), and a cadre of talented musicians have successfully endeavored to strip the gated drums and '90s ambiance from the recordings (originally produced by Johnny with Mike Daniel), instead lending them a clean, organic, and rootsy sound.  Marty Stuart, another friend and bandmate of Cash's, was brought into the studio to lend additional verisimilitude to the proceedings.

"Hello Out There" finds the singer ruminating on a big issue - the fate of the planet itself - with both resignation ("In this final fight for life and peace/We're failing, failing, failing, failing, failing...") and hope ("And the king will come and reign a thousand years/And restore His earthly realm/And there will be no night for He will be our light/Throughout eternity with Him").  But much of the LP is dedicated to less grandiose matters, including those of the heart.  "Spotlight," featuring The Black Keys' Dan Auerbach on electric guitar, is a moody reflection on lost love that harkens back to the golden age of country songwriting with its simplicity, directness, and heart-on-its-sleeve emotion.

Two songs were revisited by Cash with Rick Rubin.  "Drive On" is a Vietnam veteran's lament, still powerful in its plain-spoken recollections conjured by a sharply-observant writer.  Keeping it all in the Sun Records family, Roy Orbison's son Wesley joins Marty Stuart and John Carter Cash on electric guitar.  "Like a Soldier," with a vocal assist from Cash's friend and fellow Highwayman Waylon Jennings, is a seemingly autobiographical reflection on a life lived to the hilt.  The Songwriter versions of both tunes are musically fuller, warmer, and more colorful than the later voice-and-guitar American Recordings takes, offering a different yet valid approach to the compositions themselves.

Unsurprisingly as Songwriter was recorded in the Desert Storm era, war was clearly on Cash's mind.  "Soldier Boy," sparsely set in classic fashion to accompaniment by Stuart (guitars), Pete Abbot (drums), and Dave Roe (upright bass), offers mordant commentary ("Soldier boy...you won't be a boy no more after what you're going for") contrasted by an ironically jaunty melody.

The sweet "I Love You Tonite," a love letter in song to June, channels vintage Nashville with its weepy steel courtesy of Russ Pahl and tinkling piano of Mike Rojas. Waylon Jennings again lent his considerable presence on background vocals.  "I love you tonite even more than I did loved you in the '60s," Cash croons tenderly, "and I know that we are right, even more than I knew it in the '70s/Oh, baby, ain't we a sight?  Can you believe we made it through the '80s?  And will we make it through the millennium?  Well, we might."  (They did.)  He pays tribute to June and the Carter Family, too, on the nostalgic "Poor Valley Girl" with its traditional chick-a-boom Cash rhythm.  (Credit to Stuart on electric guitar, Mark Howard on acoustic and banjo, Roe on upright bass, Abbot on drums, and Pahl on dobro.)  Vince Gill contributes the harmony vocals to "Poor Valley Girl," but they're so low in the mix as to almost be unnoticeable.

The album's genteel feel extends to a bucolic portrait of southern life, "Have You Ever Been to Arkansas," with its imagery of beautiful women, pine trees, hot springs, and cool watermelon.  "You can see God's country put a smile on your face," Cash sings with such conviction that even staunch city folk might well believe him.  A smile will arise, too, from "She Sang Sweet Baby James," a pretty paean to a single mother with a "heart full of love, for her baby, for life, and James Taylor."  With the same loping gait as Taylor's titular song and some lyrical references, Cash reminds us of the power of music and the solace to be found in it.  It may well be the finest track on Songwriter.  His humor, almost wholly absent from the American Recordings series, is present on the flirtatious "Well Alright," about love in a laundromat, while his gifts as a storyteller are evident on "Sing It, Pretty Sue."

Songwriter isn't filled with revelations.  It's not a record that's going to change any perceptions of Cash; had it been released in the early 1990s, it most likely would have met the same fate as the Mercury albums, all of which feature fine performances from the artist and production values very much of their time.  Thirty-five or so years on, though, these recordings are a reminder of an artist whose craft was clearly undiminished in the years prior to the Rick Rubin-engineered "comeback."  A listen to Songwriter is akin to a visit from a much-missed old friend.  It's a lovely little gift from a voice that belongs to the ages.

Songwriter is available now at Amazon.  As an Amazon affiliate, we earn from qualifying purchases.

CD: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada
LP: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada / Official Store (Smoke Color Variant with Lithograph)

U.S. customers might want to check out the Target-exclusive 2CD edition with the ICON bonus disc culled from Cash's Mercury recordings of just a few years earlier, with which this album shares some musical DNA!