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mrvannort
Feb 28, 2015mrvannort rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
I first heard Rosanne Cash’s “Seven Year Itch”, which fit my acceptance of country as a young man from a small town with one radio station that had a music standard similar to the dive bar in The Blues Brothers: “We play both kinds of music here, Country & Western.” I had already swerved recklessly into punk, so my country had to be rockin’. Both Cash & Dwight Yoakam fit that mold more than Randy Travis or George Strait. However, I lost touch with Cash until I heard her album, “The List”, which is her choice of songs from her dad’s 100 greatest songs list. However that album didn’t strike me the way “The River & the Thread” has. First of all, this isn’t just a Cash album, but a collaboration with her husband, John Leventhal, who has played nearly all the music and co-wrote the songs with Cash. His playing sounds so natural & spontaneous, that the production feels like a sit-in session in someone’s living room. The first song with its refrain of “a feather is not a bird, rain is not the sea, a stone is not a mountain, but a river runs through me”, has a raw beginning with a guitar playing four minor notes in a stepping pattern, but it is Cash’s voice of longing & the lyrics of wandering along the Mississippi that sets the tone for the whole album, of a region she loves & constantly travels, at least in her memory. See the rest at: http://jksmusicreviews.blogspot.com/2014/11/rosanne-cash-river-thread.html