MP3: Snippet of Johnny Cash doing IYCRMM

[joveski]

just had this sent to me...

great version from his American V album coming out soon..

i posted the first minute of it here.. enjoy!

open the link and there should be a "download file" option:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/0eq209

[brink-]

Thanks Mende, do you know when that was recorded?

[talbot10]

Originally posted by joveski:
just had this sent to me...

great version from his American V album coming out soon..

i posted the first minute of it here.. enjoy!

open the link and there should be a "download file" option:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/0eq209

[Auburn Annie]

Brink - I think it was recorded mid-2003, just a few months before he died. You can hear the exhaustion in his voice. It's odd (to me) hearing someone other than Gord singing it.

[brink-]

It is, I had to listen to it a bit to realize it was Cash.

[charlene]

whoa - freaky - I'm watching a biography on Cash on TV and checking in here and see this...- so he's singing IYCRMM on the puter and on TV he's singing another great song by another great Canadian songwriter - Bird on A Wire - Leonard Cohen....this is freaky!

[joveski]

yeah it was done in july i think 2003.

the album wqill be released on July 1st i think

[Janice]

I find this hauntingly beautiful - thanks for sharing it Mende

[joveski]

no probs....

whats the deal with uploading official mp3s here??.. i do have the complete version but only posted the first minute just in case legal reasons creep in!

either way, the album is out soon!

[Jesse Joe]

Good work Joveski, too bad you didn't put the song in it's entirety. Johnny's voice is haunting in his later years. But still very much enjoyable to listen to. I sure miss him a lot...JJ.

Cash's effort is quite a tribute to Lightfoot.

IYCRMM is definitely a classic.

RMD

I'd love to hear the whole thing...thanks for posting.

[LSH]

Awesome Mende, thanks !!
Love Johnny Cash...and the sheer raw honesty and vulnerability in his voice in his later years...
amazing...Looking forward to the release of this album..

[joveski]

ok, here's the whole thing....

http://www.sendspace.com/file/a3ozyg

[Janice]

Thanks for the full song, Mende! Like others have stated, I too am a Johnny Cash fan. I really admire his "American" CD series and have been looking forward to this last volume of that series.

I think this will become one of my favorite covers of a Lightfoot song. The song itself, along with the haunting vulnerability of his voice is the perfect combination to captivate the listener's attention (and give them goose bumps)

Another song that did this for me, was Johnny's duet with his daughter, Rosanne Cash, called "September When It Comes" from her CD Rules Of Travel. Rosanne was influenced by 9/11 when she wrote the song, but it became so much more when her father ended up passing in September. The words and music are just beautiful and Johnny's contribution really adds to the poignancy of the song.

[LSH]

Great song Janice !! Reminded me of what a wonderful songwriter Roseanne is as well... time to explore her stuff again...
I was lucky enough to see them perform that on TV together before John's death...so poignant, and one of my favorites of his/hers...

[BILLW]

brings tears to my eyes...

Bill

[Janice]

Originally posted by LSH:
Great song Janice !! Reminded me of what a wonderful songwriter Roseanne is as well... time to explore her stuff again...
I was lucky enough to see them perform that on TV together before John's death...so poignant, and one of my favorites of his/hers...

I'm actually a huge Rosanne fan and have been since 1980ish. I have every album she has released and I have to admit that Rules Of Travel is probably my favorite of all of them. On one of the TV tributes to Johnny, after his death, they played this song while showing a montage of family photos over the years - brought tears to my eyes, it was so beautiful.

[brink-]

thanks Mende, I really appreciated you posting the whole song.

[joveski]

no probs... enjoy the tune!

[Auburn Annie]

Here's the review of American V from Entertainment Weekly:

EW review: Johnny Cash's brilliant finale

By Gilbert Cruz
Entertainment Weekly


Tuesday, June 27, 2006

(Entertainment Weekly) -- Has there been a recent musical project more death-obsessed than Johnny Cash's American Recordings cycle?

Begun in 1994 under producer Rick Rubin, the four discs that brought Cash back to artistic life were -- with the exception of 1996's often rollicking "Unchained" -- one long, slow, sometimes sullen, always gorgeous march to the grave. You could hear age creep ever more into his voice on each record.

The posthumous "American V: A Hundred Highways," an equally melancholy mix of covers, traditionals, and original compositions, looks at death and gives it a weary shrug and nod. Cash began working on it immediately after finishing 2002's "American IV: The Man Comes Around" (which starred Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt") and continued recording after the death of his longtime love, June Carter Cash, right up to his own passing on September 12, 2003. It must have been a balm on his broken heart to keep working and singing, trying to convince himself that there were still things left to live for.

"I pray that God will give me courage/To carry on till we meet again/It's hard to know she's gone forever," he croons on a cover of Hank Williams' dead-wife lament "On the Evening Train." It's a poignant song, but not nearly as much as Cash's version of Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind," in which he almost sounds more vulnerable and fragile than he did on "Hurt," practically running out of breath at the close of every lyric.

Was he thinking of his own end? His health was fading, so it's hard to imagine that he wasn't. The man's spirituality -- so overlooked in last year's "Walk the Line" -- is everywhere. There's album opener "Help Me," a plaintive prayer, followed by "God's Gonna Cut You Down," an old spiritual about the Lord's wrath, which manages to pull off a "We Will Rock You"-ish stomp/clap refrain that is simultaneously holy and badass.

One of the two songs written by Cash, "I Came to Believe," is about religious belief, while the other, "Like the 309" (the very last song he wrote), is likely about his own death, though it is definitely about a train. It's one of the few tracks that moves with Cash's old locomotive-like thrum.

That's not to suggest that "American V" is a total downer. Better put, it's contentedly bleak. If this is, as Rubin has said, "Johnny's final statement" (despite the rumors of an "American VI" -- will this be the Tupac-ification of Cash?), then it is a fitting one, completely representative of the faithful old man he had become, having long ago shed his outlaw image no matter how often others tried to resaddle him with it.

EW Grade: A-

[byKimberly]

Wow! I thoroughly enjoyed this. As Janice says "hauntingly beautiful'. Seems to me whenever Johnny did a cover, IYCRMM, Bridge Over Troubled Waters, he gave the song more personal meaning than the original. I have goose bumps listening to this.
Kimberly