Songwriter

Songwriter is the seventy-second studio album (and fifth posthumously released studio album) by Johnny Cash. It was released on June 28, 2024, through Mercury Nashville. It consists of songs Cash recorded in 1993 and the finished album features overdubs with additional musicians.

Produced by Johnny Cash, John Carter Cash, David R. Ferguson, Josh Matas, and Mike Daniel, the album contains eleven original songs by Cash: the album's lead single, "Well Alright", was released on April 23, 2024.

Background

The album was recorded as a series of songwriting demos at LSI Studios (then owned by Ken Little with Pat Holt, Mike Daniel and his wife Rosie managing the studio) at the time in early 1993 when Cash wasn't signed to a label and shortly before he met Rick Rubin. The songs were written over several decades: "Drive On" was recent, "Hello Out There" and "Poor Valley Girl" have been dated to the late '70s and "Sing It Pretty, Sue" had appeared as the last track of the 1962 album The Sound of Johnny Cash. The tapes were shelved when Cash instead made the American Recordings album with Rubin, although he used re-recordings of the songs "Drive On" and "Like A Soldier" for that album. One track, "I Love You Tonite", is about his relationship with his wife, June Carter Cash.

After rediscovering the demos, John Carter Cash and David "Fergie" Ferguson stripped them back to just Cash's vocals and guitar before overdubbing newly recorded parts by a new band, including several musicians who had worked with Cash such as Marty Stuart (credited in the liner notes as having been involved in the original recordings) and David Roe. The recordings also retain original backing vocals recorded by Waylon Jennings, who died in 2002.

Critical reception

Songwriter received positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received a score of 77 out of 100 based on nine reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

Stephen Thomas Erlewine at AllMusic compared Songwriter to another posthumous Cash release, 2014's Out Among the Stars, finding this record "a marginally stronger set, knitted together by bold, intertwining, recurring themes" and praising the decision to root the instrumentation in the styles Cash employed before his collaboration with Rubin." Liz Thomson at The Arts Desk observed that after the first two tracks the album "has a much more retro sound" than the subsequent American Recordings era, concluding that the album is "a happy reminder of Cash's great talent". Mojo was skeptical of the attempt on "Hello Out There" to "put Cash in conversation with a future he never knew – namely the postmodern outlaw updates of Sturgill Simpson" but praised the decision to curb such "revisionist impulses" on the rest of the album in favour of allowing Cash's songs to star, concluding "it is a worthy effort because it reinforces the humanity of a star who, in his last days, could seem like some untouchable god."