Saturday, September 05, 2009

951. Johnny Cash - American IV: The Man Comes Around (2002)





















Track Listing

1. The Man Comes Around
2. Hurt
3. Give My Love To Rose
4. Bridge Over Troubled Water
5. I Hung My Head
6. First Time Ever I Saw Your Face
7. Personal Jesus
8. In My Life
9. Sam Hall
10. Danny Boy
11. Desperado
12. I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry
13. Tear Stained Letter
14. Streets Of Laredo
15. We'll Meet Again

Review

Johnny Cash comes back into the list decades after his last appearance. This is actually pretty unfair as this is the fourth album in the American series, and actually it is not nearly the best one. However all of the albums are very much worthy of inclusion in any library.

Cash resurrected himself to a whole new audience in these American recordings and even if this album is a bit too obvious in its choice of covers in comparison to the previous albums of the series it is still a pretty striking album.

Cash is intensely aware of his mortality all the way through the album and it is hard listening to it after his death without it taking a sheen of prophecy. This is indeed what makes the album so powerful, even more than the songs themselves. Sometimes the covers are a bit too maudlin' such as in the case of Bridge over Troubled Water or Danny Boy, but at other times they make up for it in spades as is the case of Hurt or Personal Jesus. A great goodbye from one of the greatest.

Track Highlights

1. Hurt
2. The Man Comes Around
3. Personal Jesus
4. We'll Meet Again

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The video for "Hurt", a song written by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails in 1994, was nominated in seven categories at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards and won the award for Best Cinematography. In February 2003, mere days before his 71st birthday, Cash won another Grammy Award for Best Country Male Vocal Performance for "Give My Love To Rose," a song Cash had originally recorded in the late 1950s. The music video for "Hurt" also won a Grammy for Best Short Form Video at the 2004 Awards. This album won "Album of the year" award at the 2003 CMA awards.

Hurt, the only video to which a grown man is allowed to cry:

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hey

what's going on with your search feature?

i try to look up an album and no results come up. for example i typed in i see a darkness and got results. then i tried velvet underground which used to bring up tons of results and now only fetches two.

Francisco Silva said...

Yeah I've noticed that as well. I think it's blogger acting up.