Multi-platinum singer/songwriter Jewel took these intense lyrics that were chosen for her and internalized their meaning, creating a collaboration that hits home. “Those lyrics were very classic Johnny Cash,” she shares. “Addiction, self-worth, self-love—they’re themes of Johnny Cash’s life. You know I got to portray Johnny Cash’s wife in a Lifetime movie, so I became even closer to the story. It was based on John Carter Cash’s biography on his mother. Whether you’ve been an addict, or not, we all struggle to go to wonder, does anybody love me. That failing sense of self-worth is at epidemic proportions and I liked that this song addressed that.” As she approached interpreting and setting the lyrics to music, Jewel sought for a way to convey the meaning in the music. “To me that lyric had a tremendous amount of darkness and anxiety. We’ve all had that feeling where you can’t sit still because of your anxiety and then finally builds to this sort of critical pitch. And so I wrote it on acoustic guitar, not being like, ‘Oh I want to sound like Johnny,’ but more because I wanted to embody that restless feeling. And how can I get it to come to this sort of fever pitch and break. And so that’s what I was trying to do.” Listen now: Produced by John Carter Cash, the album was mainly recorded at The Cash Cabin Studio in Hendersonville, Tenn. The songs from the project have been released in waves, with Jewel’s interpretation of “Does Anybody Out There Love Me” in the third wave along with “Autumn” by The Watkins Family Hour, “Let It Be Tonight” by Ira Dean and “Pretty Pictures in My Mind” by The Lumineers. When Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash passed, they left behind what John Carter Cash describes as a “monstrous amassment” of things, including a treasure trove of undiscovered material that includes Johnny Cash’s handwritten letters, poems and documents, penned across the entirety of his life. Over the years, John Carter Cash and co-producers worked with a stellar cast of musicians to create new music to accompany these newly discovered Cash writings. The resulting album also served as the musical companion to the best-selling Forever Words: The Unknown Poems, a volume of Cash’s unpublished writing edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon. Many of the songs on Johnny Cash: Forever Words were directly inspired by material later published in the book while others are drawn from different sources of Cash’s unpublished writings. “My father touched the world of music in ways still evolving. The original body of work in Forever Words held some of Dad’s best unreleased writings, put to music by some of the most prolific artists alive today,” said John Carter Cash. “But there was more: poetry and lyrics that no one had ever seen, whose depth demanded the continuance of the project. And, with true artists who found melody and beauty in these unseen words, the recordings continued. Looking back now, I feel Dad would be proud to know his voice and spirit carry on here, in these Forever Words.” Next, do people who are tone deaf hear music differently?
