The List

Rosanne Cash's 'The List', dare I say it, has restored my faith in how a cover album should go. Somewhat. Clearly the exception and not the rule. But it's not the end-all, be-all either.

I will start out saying the selections I've seen her do live, played out much better in a live setting than in a recording studio - and those live versions were way stripped down, just Cash and a guitar.

But on some of this disk - Cash appears stellar. Her voice, at 54, has never seemed stronger. And in reality, it is really nice to hear Cash return to her country-bent. She never was or will be full county but I've missed some of this take on her heritage and talents.

She kicks off with "Miss the Mississippi and You" - which hearkens back to something she'd have done on 'Somewhere in the Stars'. "Motherless Children" is really stellar, but it doesn't sound nearly as sorrowful as she did it live. Still, she nails it....if you can say that about a song like this...Read more

Rosanne Cash has always been in the back of my mind a country singer, but I have also seen her as a writer of songs that she also sings. In this CD, she is unleashed from the binds of her own work. and is singing tunes from a list her father gave her 36 years ago when she was a teenager. It is a list of the 100 folk/americana songs that she needed to know about. Somehow she picked twelve of the very best, and these suit her to a 'T'. She has made a CD that is pure love and music.

Roseanne has not had the life of luxury and fun that one might imagine from a child of a celebrity. Her father was a drug addict and on the road and missing from her life most of the time. Her mother was someone whose personality was closed. You did not divulge anything about the family. She found her own way and through a couple of marriages she is happy. In the past few years she has suffered much tragedy. Her father died, her mother died, her step-mother died. She could not sing for three...Read more

Rosanne Cash was my favorite "country" female vocalist during the 1980's with her brillant string of country/rock songs that seemed to hit number one on the country charts with every single release. She was as big any female star during this era and yet she had never really chased fame, she was just a singer-songwriter who happened to be damn popular. Then suddenly after a decade of enormous success things drastically changed in both Rosanne's personal and professional life; her divorce from Rodney Crowell (who produced her records) and a drastic shift in her music from pop-rock flavored mainstream country music to a brooding folk/rock. The critics applauded but to many of Rosanne's longtime fans, it was almost as if she had divorced us as well, her music was still thoughtful and well-crafted but it was it if she was pointedly making it for new audience in a new arena. Since 1990 she has released five of these albums, which have sold dramatically less than her country work, a...Read more