Photo courtesy of Jackie Chalghin ’22.
Haven’t heard from me lately? That’s because Rosanne Cash told me to stop answering my emails.
On April 4, singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash was the first speaker to grace the stage of the new Athey Center at Palmer Auditorium. After a two year delay due to the ongoing pandemic, Cash was thoughtfully interviewed by President Katherine Bergeron for the President’s Distinguished Lecture Series. The Grammy award winner shared her thoughts on artistry, activism, and even theoretical physics.
As a person, President Bergeron is immeasurably composed, sharp, and grounded, yet even she seemed—if only a little—starstruck by Cash. Her foot tapped along to the careful meter of her speech as she conducted the interview. Still, when it comes to music, Bergeron is an expert. After posing one series of interrelated queries, Cash said, “Jeez. I didn’t realize you’d be asking me hard questions.”
In her artistry, Cash is wary of labeling songs as “activism.” She grapples with themes such as white supremacy, racial violence, and their vast temporal landscapes, but she is not under any illusions about the song as a vehicle to fix these things, or even inspire others to fix them. Cash steers away from pontificating: “People don’t like to be told what to do.”
“The Killing Fields,” a track on her most recent album, explores the aforementioned themes. In conversation, Cash confronts her racist familial history head on. She is a Tennessee native, a Southerner born into a lineage of Southerners, and this history creeps into her songwriting: “There was cotton on the killing fields / It blows down through the years / It sticks to me just like a burn / Fills my eyes and ears.”
The intergenerational resonances of racism are permanent, and rather than obscure these histories, Cash confronts them: “The blood that runs on cypress trees / Cannot be washed away by mothers’ tears / And gasoline and secrets un-betrayed.” While she is honest about the racism prevalent within her own—and by extension, the nation’s—lineage, the song ends on a sentiment Cash believes, which is that there is a way for generations to instate reparations: “And goodbye to the killing fields / I’ll break every single bow / ‘Cause all that came before you / And all that came before me / And all that came before us / Is not who we are now.”
“Doesn’t need to be who we are now” seems to me a more fitting final line, but that would break the poetic meter, which is of utmost importance to Cash. The infrastructure of her songs are sturdy, and she has high standards for her lyrics. Nothing is sloppy, everything is intentional; she expects for lyrics on the page to read as would a poem.
Cash also has an interest in theoretical physics, which she approaches with a poet’s sensibility. She finds beauty in the scientific language. Dark matter, refraction, the novas, all hold a rich capacity for metaphor, and she mined this capacity in her song “Particle and Wave.” When pressed on her interest in physics, Cash said she is drawn to its unknowability, a quality it shares with music.
Decades ago, Cash drove down from her home in Malibu Canyon with her then newborn, to the Pepperdine admissions office, and asked to be enrolled in an astronomy course. She was turned away. When Cash received an honorarium from Harvard, the university offered her an introduction to the top scholar in a field of her choice. This is how Lisa Randall, Guggenheim recipient and Professor of Physics at Harvard University, became a friend of Cash.
When asked about her ideal audience, Cash says there is one imaginary person to whom she writes and attempts to please. She can almost see what this person looks like, but not quite. Her perfect listener is a “tough mistress, but not punitive.”
At this point in her life, Cash knows the process of artmaking is more discipline than inspiration. She describes self expression without discipline as like “a toddler’s finger painting,” messy and unfocused. She assures the young artists in the audience that insecurity never fades, even admitting she sometimes wonders why make music if it will never be Bob Dylan?
Though she still might get caught in the cycle of self doubt, Rosanne Cash has been writing with a certain urgency. She quotes a proverb: “When an old woman dies, a library burns to the ground.” While mortality is intimidating, it is also motivating. Her most recent release was in 2021, and she has been at work on a musical for the past few years. She feels an unsuppressable need to get it all out.
“I won’t get to the end of my life and wish I had written more emails.”
