No one can appreciate Rosanne Cash’s voice as much as she does, although fans of her Grammy-nominated “Rules of Travel” may collectively claim second place.
Cash, who performs in a rare club appearance tonight in Seattle, lost her voice in 1998 when a polyp shut down her vocal chords, shelving work on “Rules” and costing her about 2 years of singing.
Even speaking was a trial.
“I remember my husband saying to the kids when they were acting out, ‘Don’t make your mother try to have to yell at you!’
“I had a baby and the only singing that I did in my head was to sing lullabies. It made me sad that I couldn’t really do it.”
Ironically, the daughter of Johnny Cash didn’t want to become a singer. She was an English major who wanted to be a writer.
The reluctant singer began her career with three Top-25 country hits.
“I didn’t realize how much (singing) defined me to myself until I lost it,” Cash said. “It was one of those classic journeys people take, where you don’t appreciate what you have until you lose it.”
She turned to prose, writing a children’s book, “Penelope Jane: A Fairy’s Tale,” and essays and fiction for magazines.
“My excursion into prose in a deep way helped my songwriting. I was no longer bound by a 3-minute format or a rhyme scheme and it had a liberating effect that carried over.”
Surgery, patience and a voice therapist eventually paid off, as Cash’s voice started to come back late in 2000. Today, her voice is stronger than before she lost it, with more nuances.
Once it returned, Cash and producer-musician husband John Leventhal finished “Rules of Travel,” although life didn’t automatically offer an easy road.
She’s coped with a series of personal losses, including the deaths of her stepmother, June Carter Cash, in May 2003; and her father, Johnny Cash, in September of the same year.
The losses have made one song on the album a bittersweet offering. “September When It Comes” is a father-daughter duet.
“It is about mortality, certainly, but it’s also about living with what is unresolved in your own heart,” Cash said. “And it’s about more than that, but I wouldn’t want to take away any individual interpretations.”
“Rules of Travel” certainly has a touch of melancholy, but Cash never falls into the quagmire of angst. Her literate folk-pop lyrics are matched by a deliberate pacing, but any trace of past navel-gazing has been washed away.
She’s no longer country music’s rebel daughter, although even that stage was productive enough to help clarify the phrase alt-country in the late 1980s with songs such as “Seven Year Ache,” “Runaway Train” and “The Way We Make a Broken Heart.”
It is true, though, that the hard times seem to strike a more emotional place than the good times.
“Maybe it’s the confusion in the hard times,” she said. “You want to make sense of it to yourself. If you’re a writer, writing is a way to make sense of it.”
While most of Cash’s songs are grounded in real-life experiences, she’s quick to say that “it doesn’t mean I tear a page from my diary. I can’t avoid using the only life I have but I don’t use a fact checker.”
Her songs are much more than a musical version of a diary entry, well-crafted by a writer who succeeds at more than one level and in more than one genre.
“My being a writer is what I am. One day I’ll stop singing, but I’ll never stop writing. If I hadn’t been a songwriter, I wouldn’t be a singer. I can’t say the reverse.”
Roseanne Cash performs tonight in Seattle.
Roseanne Cash
8 tonight, The Triple Door, 216 Union St., Seattle; $55; 206-838-4333.
Roseanne Cash
8 tonight, The Triple Door, 216 Union St., Seattle; $55; 206-838-4333.
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