Rosanne Cash has spent more than a decade making terrific music, hardheaded and openhearted, and has never broken through to the mainstream. As the daughter of Johnny Cash, an artist damaged by his own stardom, Cash retains well-grounded suspicions toward conventional standards of "making it." Such profound ambivalence often leads to great music, and Interiors is a great record.
Producing herself for the first time, Cash succeeds in creating deceptively placid settings teeming with dangerous undercurrents. This is acoustic-based music as articulate and biting as any heard since Elvis Costello's King of America; moments like the guitar solo in "Real Woman," or the catch
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in Cash's voice the first time she reaches the chorus of "I Want a Cure," stand out vividly.
Having written all ten songs on the album (she shares credit on four numbers), Cash has stretched beyond her previous efforts, but not always to great effect. The imagery in her songs is rarely as arresting or as cutting as she intends it to be. Even so, her lyrics are suggestive; often fragmented, they're delivered like jottings from an analytic session. They conspire with the music's edgier qualities, cutting against the grain and subverting many of the reassuring aspects of the music's surface. "This World," with its gorgeous bass figures, is openly seductive, making the everyday brutality Cash describes in the song all the more stunning.
This year will see many observances of the tenth anniversary of John Lennon's death. Interiors serves as an apt tribute, for like much of Lennon's best work, the album presents pop music that is, at bottom, antipop – and deeply unsettling.
Interiors flies in the face of the happy-ending fairy tales that pass for entertainment in this country. It is disturbing, and it offers no answers. The record ends with a brief glint of hope, but there's little cause to believe that it can be sustained. It can only be fervently wished that on the strength of this album's achievement, Cash herself finds sufficient reason to keep digging below the surface of our complacencies. (RS 591)
WAYNE KING
