A Night with Rosanne Cash
by Britney Sires
Last weekend, Iowa City had the privilege of hosting two special guests at Hancher Auditorium. Rosanne Cash, decorated singer/songwriter and eldest daughter of legendary musician Johnny Cash, was joined onstage with Writers’ Workshop alumna, A.M. Homes.
Rosanne Cash.
Photo via Rosanne Cash
Front and center on Hadley Stage of Hancher Auditorium is where Cash and Homes sat in two cherry red seats. The stage soon disappeared around them as their conversation became intimate. The chemistry between the two women was obvious; they had become friends by chance through mutuals several years ago. Cash and Homes came to Iowa City together to share their ideas of the disciplines of creativity and imaginative processes, with an underlying conversation about carrying on family legacies.
The audience included many kinds of people from various backgrounds; however, it’s important to note that many were of the older generation. Some were songwriters themselves, others were professors and associates of the University. A common theme they shared was remembering Johnny Cash when he performed at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, back in 1963.
The first thing Rosanne wanted to talk to the audience about was what she has learned from performers in other fields. She often seeks inspiration from people working and creating in vastly different disciplines: neuroscience, biochemistry, engineering, and more. She described it as a way to “go outside your wheelhouse...”
“Event horizons, dark matter, the attraction of atoms and how they move, how they react to each other; that’s something I find endlessly fascinating. Reading and learning about that, I was able to write my song Particle in Wave, about how light is two things at once, both particle and wave. Is love powerful enough to slow the speed of light? Going outside my wheelhouse is something essential to what I do”
Who knew that a famous and highly decorated singer, songwriter, and author would look for inspiration from neuroscientists? Passion expelled from Cash as she went on to talk about how important it is to notice your thoughts and become drawn to other areas that inspire you. You could tell the audience was attentive, listening to their narrative and applying it to their own lives.
“Exploring a creative process in a different area than what I was used to is how I kept from getting sick of myself. I took up painting for a while, just to see what the experience was like. The most interesting thing was that the process of painting was exactly the same as singing and songwriting. All creative processes and impulses have a very similar protectory. You start with a burst of inspiration, then confusion, dangerous moments, doubt, and then you get an idea of where you can take that inspiration and where it might play out.”
Cash discussed imposter syndrome and how doubting your own accomplishments is a part of the process. One day you feel like you know what you’re doing, then the next week you feel awful and continue to ask yourself “what’s the point?” Both Cash and Homes had multiple encounters of wanting to give up and turn around but continued to move forward. That’s how artists survive in these days of living in a vacuum.
Listening to them talk made me wonder, how do you get people to like something you write? Every author wants to be read as they want to be seen. But how should that message come across, what do people care about in writing? What do they want from a song? Cash offered:
“You shouldn’t write about themes; nobody cares about themes, even if they’re set to a rock and roll beat. People care about details; they care about a window, the rain, a coffee cup, a dollar bill, a table that got turned over when he walked out on you, they care about furniture and the people that inhabit those rooms. The more detail, the better. Specific details are things we just eat up.”
Listening to Cash talk about her experience as a singer and songwriter, you can’t help but appreciate how someone can be so deeply embedded in their work. This conversational lecture was an opportunity for dreamers to come together and gain inspiration and motivation from two great women in the arts. A great part about this segment was that the audience had the ability to ask questions at the end, inquiries and answers are below:
Q: Rosanne, how has your father, the man in black, still been able to inspire you?
Cash: “In many ways, I think I inherited his work ethic for one thing. An artist without a work ethic is going to fall apart, the creativity will dry up and I’m grateful for that. My dad embodied rhythm, and I always think about how rhythmic his life was and how he heard things in rhythm. He had a great artist mind and saw the world in a way that no one else I knew could. He also adored children. You keep the good things about your parents with you”
Q: Homes, as an author, do you have any advice to young writers?
Homes: “Write. Write whether you have a deadline or write whether you have a class, it is the thing about a work ethic. Nobody is going to make you write. If there’s anything that can stop you from doing it, it will stop you. Get up 15 minutes earlier and just write. Don’t judge yourself based on your writing, you don’t have to be perfect at it, you have to just do the work.”
Q: How do you deal with a lack of motivation in the creative process?
Cash: “I search outside myself. Go to the museum, look at a great painting. Getting your competitive spirit sparked is really good. Reading or listening to something great and thinking that you want to write something better than that”
Homes: “When we think about a lack of motivation, is it really a lack of motivation or is it fear? What is that? Ask yourself what this lack of motivation and what am I afraid of. Break it down into smaller parts. You can motivate yourself for fifteen minutes. I tell my thesis students to ask yourself what are you going to do for the next half hour? How are you going to get through the day? Get to that cup of coffee, what can you do next? If you have to write a 1000-page novel, or a whole album, try just a paragraph. It doesn’t even have to be good. 10 words. Make it something you can do.”
Q: How do you maintain creativity?
Homes: “You have enormous amounts of creativity and don’t let anyone tell you you don’t. It’s in science, it’s in history, it’s in everything we do. What you pull together for breakfast is a creative thing. It’s really important to do anything with any means that stretches you out a little bit further. Realizing that creative risk and intellectual risk, nothing terrible will happen to you. It’s so much better than 9 million other things you can do. Keep going for it and know that it’s always out there, creativity is an energy source, it is a source of power and comfort. You can keep creativity your whole life”
The audience was unquestionably thankful to hear these two women speak about their creative journeys. After the lecture was over, I couldn’t help but feel a new type of motivation or gratitude within yourselves. It was like being thrown into a spin cycle of wanting to create, create, create, and live.
Coming back to Hancher Auditorium on Saturday night was what tied everything together. Cash performed live alongside her husband and talented musician, John Leventhal, along with four other stunning performers. It was obvious that they not only loved their music but loved to perform alongside each other. Connections like theirs couldn’t be synthetic.
Cash’s music provides hidden details about her family’s history and her own life. Listening to several of her albums in concert such as The River & The Thread, The List, Seven Year Ache, as well as her newest She Remembers Everything, gave the audience a past, present, and future sense of who she was, both historic and personable.
One of her most moving pieces was the song Money Road that tells the story of a series of trips Cash and her husband took down to the South through the Delta. This route through Mississippi has two important landmarks in American history. Money Road is where Blues legend Robert Johnson is buried, and also the site of Bryant’s Grocery Store, from where 14-year-old Emmett Till was abducted and killed.
The song, along with most of the pieces Cash produces, had layered instrumentals throughout. Several keyboards and even more guitars focused their energy and tune to tell the story, one of the brutal history behind Money Road: “A lonesome boy in a foreign land, out on money road, and a voice we’ll never understand”
Cash explores into the genre Americana, which combines cultural characteristics of the United States and American people as a whole by combining folk, blues, and other rhythm styles. She enjoys this different style of music very much, because she is able to tell about her own Cash family history and tie it into her experiences today.
Along with the Civil Rights Movement, Cash’s other song lyrics have a message she wants to portray to her daughters specifically, as well as other women. Her song The Undiscovered Country, addresses both the #MeToo movement and her anger towards the patriarchal administration of today. Government administration and officials have continually ignored issues such as reproductive health and equal pay. Cash wants to make sure that her daughters and other women alike feel as though they do, in fact, have a place in this world.
After attending this concert, it became obvious how Rosanne Cash was able to pave her own path in music after her father’s legacy. She samples in folk, pop, rock, blues, and Americana and incorporates stories of struggles, romance, and relations with the world in her music. After hearing the conversation she had on Friday with Homes, the concert performance is the element that opens eyes as to what her process is like, beginning to end.
In her encore performance, she played her most famous song, written by her father, “Tennessee Flat Top Box.” The audience became electric with the melody and soothing voice of Cash. The lyrics seemed to fit exactly with her soul. Snapping fingers and clapping to the beat soon became the movement within Hancher. Long guitar riffs were followed by cheers, it was the perfect ending to a Saturday night concert.
Iowa City was left a little different when Rosanne Cash got off stage, with a new appreciation for unexpected inspiration, discipline, creativity, and history lingers in the air.