By Ron Rosenbaum
This article originally appeared on the Smithsonian Magazine website.
If you know Rosanne Cash only as Johnny Cash’s daughter, then you haven’t had your heart shattered, your life changed, your spirits lifted—then dashed into the dust—by one of her dangerously beautiful songs. You haven’t sighed tragically over her doomy, painfully romantic “Sleeping in Paris” or had your emotional life caught up on “The Wheel” or found yourself alone in a darkened room with an attractive stranger listening to her breathtaking, heart-racing “Runaway Train.” You have missed one of the most gifted singer-songwriters of our time.
Her songs are intense; they stay with you like a lifelong fever. They create worlds lit by what Cash described to me as “the ebullience that comes from darkness.” She’s not a country and western singer in the tradition of her famous father. She’s American music’s theoretical physicist of love.
I’ll get to the connection between love and theoretical physics (seriously) a little later, when I come to our conversation about multiverse theory. But first, let’s get this identity thing straightened out. Cash is not a country gal, never was. She only lived in Nashville for nine years, she pointed out when we met for lunch near her apartment in the heart of New York City’s Greenwich Village. She grew up in Southern California, was a Beatlemaniac rock ’n’ roll chick in her youth, lived in Europe and has been a New Yorker for 20 years.
