Cash Returns After Vocal Therapy With 'rules Of Travel'

"I know big labels are dinosaurs and everything's changing," Rosanne Cash says, "but at the risk of sounding retro, I'm glad to be with Capitol."

She's particularly grateful for the label's forbearance during the long journey toward the creation of her latest album, Rules of Travel, released March 25. It's her first album in 10 years, with the exception of 1996's 10 Song Demo, which had been her first and only project for Capitol until now.

Cash began work on Rules of Travel in 1998, then frighteningly lost her voice; it took more than two years in vocal therapy for it to return to its previous strength and quality. The problem originated with vocal polyps caused by hormones during her pregnancy with her now-4-year-old son, Jake.

The downtime grew from a frustration into an identity crisis for Cash, who worried that her career was over. When her voice first disappeared, she says, "I didn't really care because I was going to give that time to the baby anyway. Then the baby was a year old and my voice still wasn't back, and I freaked out." During that time, she says, it was "too depressing" to even pick up a guitar. "At some point, it started eating away at my self-esteem."

But in a sense, missing something she had previously somewhat taken for granted was an eye-opener for Cash. "I found that I really wanted [a singing career.] And that was a great thing, actually; a profound experience. I wanted to sing just for the joy of it."

The ordeal ultimately helped her in the recording of Rules of Travel. "I didn't have the anxiety about singing that I had before I lost my voice," she says. "I felt more accepting of myself."

Cash wrote or co-wrote eight of the album's 11 tracks; she recorded it in New York with her husband/producer John Leventhal, who she says "had a real vision that [the album] should draw from all eras of my career, plus the newness of where I am right now. I feel it's not as navel-gazing as some of my records in the past. I'm not working out anger or regret so much [now] as [I am] living out the questions."

The album features vocal collaborations with Sheryl Crow, Steve Earle, and her father, Johnny Cash, and includes songs written by Jakob Dylan, Joe Henry, and Marc Cohn. Cash looked to other writers a little more for this project, explaining, "I was really sick of my own thoughts. I wanted to interpret someone else's thoughts. It turns out we were all thinking the same things."

The pairing with her legendary father on "September When It Comes" is, Cash says, her first real duet with him, even though they have recorded together before. The song, which Cash and Leventhal co-wrote, is about mortality. Cash says, "It was partly about my dad, because his health had started to degrade around the time I wrote that song. It was the first time I ever had to deal with a parent's mortality." Still, she says, she needed some convincing before she asked her father to sing with her: "I didn't want it to look like a gimmick."

Once Cash finally did ask her father, he told her he'd have to read the lyrics before he'd agree to do it. "He's an artist through and through," she says, laughing at the memory.

Rick Camino, Capitol's senior director of marketing, thinks Rules of Travel has "broad appeal" and says the first step in the label's marketing plan was "reintroducing her to the trade—media, radio, and retail." In January, Capitol hosted a showcase for Cash in New York and also had her perform at a triple-A radio convention in Hawaii.

Calling Cash "a hybrid artist who doesn't have an obvious radio format," Camino says the first single, "Rules of Travel," is being worked to triple-A and Americana stations. Capitol wants to cross the record to AC or adult top 40 later. "I don't think we're going to be beating down top 40's door," she says with a laugh.

In the mid- and late '80s, the Grammy Award-winning Cash was a consistent country radio hitmaker for her then-label, Columbia, notching nine No. 1 singles, including "I Don't Know Why You Don't Want Me" and "Runaway Train." Today, she no longer feels much kinship with country radio. "I don't even know what the rules are there [anymore]." She notes that "an entire musical generation has come and gone" since her last country hit.

Beyond radio, Camino says the label's marketing plan "is motivating the consumers." To that end, the label lined up TV appearances for Cash during the album's release week, as well as an appearance on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. Cash is also being featured on syndicated radio shows The Cutting Edge, This Week in Americana, and World Cafe, as well as in specials on XM Satellite Radio and Music Choice. "The goal here," Camino says, "is just to get the music in front of an adult audience."