Producer Rick Rubin has put the finishes touches on the late Johnny Cash’s final album, American V.
Appropriately for an American institution, the album will be released on the 4th of July; it will feature the work Cash did in the short time between his wife June Carter Cash’s passing and his own death.
“Johnny said that recording was his main reason for being alive,” said Rubin, in an interview with Billboard Magazine. “And I think it was the only thing that kept him going, the only thing he had to look forward to.”
The collection, in addition to featuring covers of Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Further On (Up The Road),” will include the last song ever written by Cash: a train song called “Like the 309.”
If July 4th seems too far away, take solace in the face that, on May 23rd, Columbia/Legacy will be releasing Personal Life, a heretofore-unreleased collection of tracks Cash recorded in the ’70s which stylistically resemble the work he would later come to do with Rubin.
