Summer of Cash

Any discussion of Rosanne Cash these days must include some
reference to her lively, busy Twitter page, which details everything from the
new shoes she bought to the things she worries about at three in the morning.
This being Cash, however, her 3 a.m. fears aren’t the usual insomniac’s.
Instead of mortality, she wonders on Twitter “What if there’s a sprinkler &
it goes off when I’m sleeping & my red hair color gets on the pillow &
someone thinks it’s blood.” Cash saves her dark nights of the soul for her
music.

Cash greets questions about her life on Twitter with a
laugh. “I have a lot of manic energy and it’s a good place to dump it so I
don’t have to carry it around with me,” she says.

One of the more engaging celebrities on Twitter (and
certainly one of the few who doesn’t self-edit), Cash shrugs off the suggestion
that she might have enjoyed the social network when she was a Nashville
hitmaker in the 1980s. “I think it would have been awkward. I didn’t have as
good a sense of myself,” she says. And certainly the Internet trolls who come
out of the shadows to attack her for her liberal views would have been even
more unnerving than they are today.

“They’re so vicious,” Cash says. “A lot of them will use my
dad to attack me, ‘He would be so ashamed of you!’” She pauses. “Sometimes I
just choose to see them as figures of my subconscious, just to put a
perspective on it. ‘These are not real, they’re just a little nightmare that I
can wake up from.’”

And Cash certainly has enough on her plate to shrug off the
occasional attacks on her Twitter page. In addition to her usual summertime
touring schedule, this year she’s celebrating the paperback release of her
lilting memoir Composed and the release
this past spring of the Essential Rosanne Cash, a must-have for fans of both country music and
singer-songwriters, and somehow found the time to write songs for an upcoming
album, her first since 2009’s The List and her first album of new material since 2006’s Black
Cadillac.

“We’re trying to get T Bone Burnett to produce, if he’s not
too busy,” Cash confides. “I’m in the middle of writing songs. I was trying to
describe [the new album’s sound] to somebody; some of it is very rootsy, some
of it is very tough and some of it is very Julie London. I’m really digging
it,” she says. “After my brain surgery, I got really interested in
neuroscience. I have this friend who’s a theoretical physicist at Harvard who
will deign to dumb down and explain things to me,  and some of these songs have this science stuff to them.”

As for making the press rounds for Composed again, Cash is weary but game. “I want to spend some
time in my own kitchen and just think and not do,” she says from the road. A
decade in the writing, Composed
is a wry and carefully observed memoir that shies away from digging too deep
beneath Cash’s persona, while giving away as much personal information as she
deems appropriate (a refreshing tactic, given the publicity-hungry hordes
crowding our TV screens). An easy book to read, Composed couldn’t have been an easy one to write. Cash
remembers her editor insisting on including what she didn’t think was
necessary: the eulogies she delivered over the course of two years for her
stepmother, father and mother, a series of losses that inspired the haunting Black
Cadillac.

“It was like the—I hate to say nadir, but the center dark
point. I argued with my editor quite a lot about it, actually,” Cash says. “And
he felt so strongly about it that I capitulated. And I thought framing it in
what I wore to each funeral was a nice psychological device, to balance out the
mourning. On the hardest days of your life, to think about what I’m gonna
wear—I thought that made it more poetic.”

Cash’s fans already know that she has a knack for finding
the poetry—and salvation—in the darkness. She wouldn’t admit it on Twitter, but
surely that’s what she’s really doing at three in the morning.

Cash will be signing copies of Composed 7
p.m., Aug. 9, Barnes and Noble, 33 E. 17th St. & 7 p.m., Aug. 11,
powerHouse Arena, 37 Main St., Brooklyn.