album, whether he's covering Neil Diamond or David Allan Coe or Will Oldham or the vaudevillian Bert Williams or himself. So the onus here lies on the production: I can't believe I'm making this complaint of a country record - they're usually so overproduced -- but Rick Rubin's work is too timid; mostly, the shy combos of guitar, fiddle and accordion, or Benmont Tench's subliminal contributions on keyboards, make up the kind of severe meal that one is forced to think of as "tasteful."
It takes Nick Cave and Mick Harvey's overpoetic "The Mercy Seat," smack in the middle of the album, to represent what the album could have achieved: The song has a layered production, with organ, regular and tack piano, and accordion swelling and receding under Cash's onrushing, Leonard Cohen-like delivery. It's the moment of the greatest artistic risk; by the end of the record, we're back again to offhand drawing-room performances with the beautiful traditional song "Wayfaring Stranger."
There's nothing wrong with drawing-room performances; I can quickly think of a dozen country singers who ought to make a record like this. Solitary Man is good -- better than good. But there are issues of repertory here; when you end up with Traveling Wilburys songs alongside pieces of silver like Cash's "Wayfaring Stranger," you start wondering how we got here. (RS 852)
BEN RATLIFF
Among country's old guard, Johnny Cash remains incontrovertibly cool. Arbiters of hip from '60s Dylan to '90s U2 have grooved to the renegade soul of this Arkansas sharecropper's son, this original rockabilly. Aptly, Rick Rubin provides American Recordings a production that's tougher than leather: stark guitar and Cash's wise-as-Isaiah vocal delivery. Songs by writers as diverse as Leonard Cohen, Glenn Danzig, Nick Lowe and Tom Waits make this Cash's boldest collection, but it's Cash's own work ("Delia's Gone," "Redemption") and the tense yin and yang of his restless heart and Christian soul that provoke country as cathartic as country gets.
Another snowcapped mountain, Willie Nelson plays it safe on Healing Hands. Grouping his classics ("Crazy," "Night Life") with standards of the sort that propelled Stardust ("I'll Be Seeing You," "All the Things You Are"), his 1978 crossover breakout, country's mildly disreputable granddad battles a clot of strings but slices through. The character of his singing, after all – as rivetingly mannerist as any jazz vocalist's – cannot be denied.
Duets have been the fail-safe airplay guarantor of recent years, so Tammy Wynette's series of star turns with Sting, Lyle Lovett, Smokey Robinson, Wynonna and Joe Diffie is no conceptual earth shaker. But Without Walls contains enough of her trademark overbrimming emotion to jerk bountiful tears. With Conway Twitty gone, Tammy finds in her old partner George Jones the only real rival to her gift for gush. (RS 698/699)
PAUL CORIO
