Rosanne Cash Talks Songwriting, Twitter and How Streaming Hurts Musicians

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By Jim Roberts2014-02-07 12:47:29 -0500

Rosanne Cash has been writing songs for 35 years and creating hit records for almost as many, but few have achieved the popular and critical success of her most recent release, “The River and the Thread.”

The album debuted in mid-January at No. 11 on the Billboard album chart and quickly rose to No. 1 on Amazon’s music best sellers’ list. The Los Angeles Times recently predicted that the album would earn its place among “the most powerful works of 2014.”

See also: 13 Must-Follow Musicians on Instagram

"The River and the Thread" traces a reunion of sorts that Cash experienced with her family’s roots in the Deep South, weaving together bits of history of the region and glimpses of the world her father, Johnny Cash, grew up in.

She approached this release with a unique, grassroots marketing effort, powered in part by social networks, from creating an interactive world on Pinterest where fans can hover over places mentioned in her lyrics, to a Twitter Q&A session with the #askrosanne hashtag.

But Cash still struggles with the way technology has disrupted the music business. Her experience with Spotify has been particularly harsh: a $200 paycheck for a half-million streams.

Cash recently met with tech reporter Samantha Murphy Kelly and me at Mashable to discuss the music business, social media and how her father might have responded to the changing landscape.

Mashable: Streaming technology has been a major disruption to the music business. How hard is it to make a living in the business these days?

I asked my song publisher to send me my Spotify earnings from the past few years. I knew it was going to bad, but it was devastating. It was hundreds of thousands of streams, and I received a little more than $200. It was not only bad because it’s harder to make a living; I have to go on the road more often, and I have a teenager at home. That's really hard. I hate leaving him.

Johnny Cash and Rosanne in 1985.

Image: Ebet Roberts/Getty Images

Streaming has hurt all of us, all musicians. But the people it hurts the most are young musicians who are just starting out. I know several who have given up their careers who are not doing the thing they love the most because they can’t survive.

I’m going to testify before Congress this year about copyright law. I think the way to make it personal while talking to legislators is to tell this story: In the 1950s, Willie Nelson sold the song “Nightlife” for $500. He was starving, but sold this song which became a classic and had millions of airplays. Different artists recorded it over the last several decades. He never got any royalties. He never got anything beyond the $500. Because of situations like that, copyright law was strengthened. BMI and ASCAP started taking care of songwriters.

We're back to a state where we basically sell a song for $500. We’re back to where Willie Nelson was in the 1950s. It’s heartbreaking to be so devalued.

Are there any advantages at all from streaming?

A big argument is people will find out about your music through streaming and they’ll purchase the record or they’ll go to see your concert. Maybe that’s true. But people also go on Spotify and listen to the music and don’t buy it.

Are you still buying records? Are you using iTunes.

I buy CDs, but I download from iTunes. I never use Spotify. Ever. My principles will not let me cross that line.

Your career has spanned decades; going back to the days of vinyl, cassettes, CDs and now, digital music. To what extent does technology affect the way you interact with your audience?

When I first started, we were making vinyl records; there were other delivery systems but vinyl was primary. I loved the sound of it — I still do. I was so interested that I started taking engineering manuals home at night. I loved the technology. It felt like sculpting. You could touch it.

On my album, “Seven Year Ache,” John Lennon had been killed three days before we mastered. So I went in the mastering lab that day and had the engineer cut “Goodbye John” into the runout groove of the master, so the first 25,000 copies of "Seven Year Ache" had “Goodbye John” scratched into the runout groove. Every time someone brings me a copy to sign at a show, I pull it out to check if it’s a first pressing.

Have you lost that intimacy?

When everything began to be digitally recorded, the learning curve got really steep for me. I couldn’t go into Pro Tools; I couldn’t grok it. I miss that. I guess I have turned my attention now to what mics sound really good because that’s still very visceral. I like holding a vinyl album, but I’m not seduced into thinking it’s like it used to be.

Your new record is a giant hit. To what do you owe its success?

In my early career, I had a couple of records in the pop charts; it was what they called "crossover." But most of them were on the country charts. Now, I don’t belong on country radio. I see country as a marketing division, rather than a genre division. What’s on country radio is specific and has certain allegiances, and loyalties between radio programmers, and all of these things that I haven’t been a part of for many, many years.

So how is it a success now? Critically, it’s really good. Chart-wise, it’s doing well. Sales? There’s a formula, and I think a quarter of a million sales now would have been 2 million about 15 years ago or something. Streaming has hurt musicians.

In terms of marketing, you’ve done a lot on social media; it’s a comfortable tool for you. Can you describe your approach?

I like Twitter and bursts of writing. I have an almost too fast mind and attention span, and I enjoy interacting with people that way. I started to get to know the most interesting people on Twitter — a professor of philosophy, musicians, other writers — and some have become true friends.

I didn't have a record out when I originally went on Twitter, but as my friend Mike Doughty said, it’s like boot camp for songwriters. If you can say it in 140 characters and pare it down to be succinct and somewhat poetic, that's good. I never used it for PR in the beginning — I like the café society aspect of Twitter — but now that I’ve got a record out, I sometimes use it for promotion. I don’t abuse it.

Do you write your own Tweets?

My tweets are my own — sometimes to my own detriment. Early on, I got into trouble a few times on the site. I didn’t realize a lot people we’re reading it. I thought I was talking to my friends.

Do you use it while watching TV at night?

A couple of years ago, I created something called “Jane Austen at the Super Bowl.” I watched the game, which I don’t often do, and tweeted as if I were Jane Austen. It got picked up by The Huffington Post and by Jane Austen fan sites. This year, people started saying to me, “Why isn’t Jane Austen tweeting the Super Bowl?”

Describe how you are using Pinterest to help promote the album.

I emailed my daughters a year or two ago about Pinterest, and they said, "Mom, you are so late to the party." When the record came out, the social media team wanted to use interactive photos and lyrics, and I just loved the concept. They started assembling something and I wrote the text to introduce each song. Each song has its own page with photographs and lyrics. It’s been really cool.

Who do you listen to when you buy music? Who do you like?

I buy everything from field recordings to bluegrass and hip hop. Most recently, I love the Decemberists and I was just listening to the Norah Jones/Billy Joe [Armstrong, of Green Day] album recently.

How do you feel about artists using YouTube to hit it big?

I have no problem with people finding music through YouTube, but I’d love it if people knew how records really sounded. Once songs are filtered through the site, it doesn’t sound the way the record was made and how the artist heard it herself. My son is 15 and gets music from YouTube, but fortunately, he then buys it. So maybe the model does work for him and others?

Let’s talk about the album. It's been referred to as a personal travelogue. Is that a fair characterization?

The album is called “The River and the Thread” and its both metaphorical and real. The "river" is the Mississippi and also the DNA and the geography that goes through all of us. The "thread" is a reference to my dear friend Natalie was teaching me to sew in Alabama. She took my needle and said, “You have to love the thread.” While was driving through the South, I kept thinking of that.

Cash's latest album quickly rose to the top spot of Amazon's music best sellers' list.

Image: Rosanne Cash

I started visiting the South again when Arkansas State University purchased my dad's boyhood home and asked the family to be involved in restoring it. The sense of time travel in this record is palpable. I went back to house where I was born. I visited the Tallahatchie Bridge that was made famous in “The Ode to Billie Joe" and went to the grocery store in Money, Miss., where Emmett Till went in and was subsequently murdered. The Civil Rights movement began because of that. The store is still there. You can touch these places.

All of those things, they were so moving to us. [My husband] John [Levanthal] started conceptualizing it before I did. He said this is a source of deep inspiration for your songs. We could write about this. He encouraged me to write these songs outside of myself. Of course, that was impossible – my story is threaded through - but I wrote a lot of songs that are third-person narratives and that was the first time I did that to some extent. As Faulkner says, "The past isn't over. It hasn't even passed." Going back there made me realize that these things are still very much alive.

Did you ever ask yourself, “Why didn’t I do this sooner?”

I don’t think I could have done it sooner. All songwriting I’ve done in the last 35 years led up to this. That sounds a little grand, but every bit of refinement you achieve in your songwriting hopefully leads to better songs. John’s push to write third-person songs opened up a whole new world of song writing for me. I don’t think I could have done it earlier. Ray Charles said you are a better singer at 50 than you are at 30. I think you are a better songwriter too.

What was the Beatles’ “Ed Sullivan” night like for you?

It was a big night for me. I remember sitting in front of the TV a half an hour early because I was so afraid I would miss it. I kept watching the clock. My mother took my sisters into the kitchen and said, “Be quiet. Rosanne is watching The Beatles.” I thought that was one of the sweetest things she ever did.

My parents were very ecumenical in their musical taste and they listened to everything. My mother protected my love of the Beatles, and my father went to see them at Candlestick Park in San Francisco and got their autographs for me and my sister, which I still have. They were both totally supportive about my obsessive love for the Beatles.

Did your father record any other Beatles songs besides “In My Life?”

I think that is the only one he recorded. I recorded one that became a No. 1 record: “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party.” We did it bluegrass style. It was really fun.

There was a quote recently in the New York Times from your husband John that said, “Sometimes being Johnny Cash's daughter is more of a burden than a gift." Can you elaborate?

I wouldn’t have said that, but when I was 25, I thought it was more of a burden. Now, I would say there are difficult parts to it, but it’s more of a gift because I don’t have to push against it anymore. In fact, at my age, it would be so ungracious to keep pushing against it. Making “The List” in 2010 really changed that for me. I held on to the defensiveness about it longer than necessary, but then I thought, “Hey, this is a legacy.” And if I didn’t claim it, someone else will.

My heart was never closed to my dad, as my dad. But the iconic status and everything that came with it, including psychotic people who like to channel his voice from the grave to tell me I’m doing the wrong thing, that stuff drove me nuts. Now, I just see that as white noise. The music is so important. I say to my son, “Do you know this song of your grandpa’s?”

Given how difficult it is to survive in the music industry, do you encourage your son to become a musician, or tell him to try, maybe, real estate?

We encourage our son to be around music, but we don’t have to. He is so immersed in it. He taught himself how to play piano and you show him a few chords on the guitar or bass and he goes from there. Music is currency in my family, generations back and generations forward. It’s how we talk about things.

Your dad connected with a younger audience through covers like the Nine Inch Nails song, “Hurt.” Do you think he would have had affinity for connecting with a younger generation on social media?

It’s hard to say if my dad would have connected with people through social media because he was from a different generation and I’m not sure it would have made sense to him. He was also a deeply reflective person. Any time he wasn’t working, he liked to spend time alone and think. I don’t know if that would have been a good match for him. Having said that, he was very restless — and that restless energy may have found an outlet through social media.

But he never had to make an effort to connect with younger people. He felt himself to be younger, no matter how old he was. I remember he said to me in my early 20s that, “I can learn so much more from a 19-year-old than someone my own age.” I thought that was beautiful.

Some questions and answers have been edited for brevity.

Topics: Entertainment, Marketing, Music, Social Media

Image: Rick Diamond/Getty Images