John Carter Cash tried to keep Johnny Cash’s recordings true to his style without much editing.
In a recent conversation with American Songwriter, the musician revealed what they wanted to focus on in Cash’s compilation album, ‘Songwriter’:
“You could look at the waveform and see where Dad would sing out of pitch but it’s right. You don’t mess with it. So, we didn’t have to do hardly any manipulation as far as tuning or anything like that. Technically, it was a simple production. It was just a matter of making sure that the core of it was there being Dad and an acoustic guitar whether it was his or Marty’s.”
What Did John Like During The Making Process Of The Record?
Carter had some challenges, but everyone also enjoyed themselves backstage. He and David ‘Fergie’ Ferguson talked about their favorite parts of the process in the same interview:
“I loved ‘Hello Out There’ the whole thing. Then, ‘Drive On’ was a lot of fun. I don’t usually hire myself as a guitar player but I play the lead guitar at the end of ‘Drive On.’ It’s the sort of screaming kind of electric guitar that I got to do. Wesley Orbison plays on that with me. In the edit when I was looking at it, I was like, ‘Well, I’ll be damned if it doesn’t actually work’ so we left it in there. I felt good about that.”
Ferguson added after him:
“When we were finally in the mixing process, it was a lot of fun to do. Everybody was able to put their ideas into it. We had the really great musicians that I’ve been working with for a long time, John Carter’s been working with them, too. Russ Paul, Mike Rojas, Mike Roe, Dave Abbot, and others.”
‘Songwriter’ arrived on June 28 and features 11 unreleased recordings Cash demoed in 1993, all his own songs. Out of the 11 songs Cash wrote for the set, only two were re-recorded and released: ‘Drive On’ and ‘Like a Soldier,’ which appeared differently on Cash’s first album produced by Rick Rubin, ‘American Recordings.’