Johnny Cash - American IV: The Man Comes Around

In 1993 Johnny Cash was a legend without a label, dropped by Nashville and playing dinner theaters. Rick Rubin signed him, sat him in a living room with a guitar, and let him sing whatever he wanted. The American Recordings series that followed became the greatest late-career resurrection in popular music.

The Man Comes Around, released in 2002, is the one everybody knows, and the reason is four minutes long. Cash's reading of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" and Mark Romanek's video turned a young man's song about addiction into an old man's reckoning with his whole life, and it devastated Trent Reznor along with everyone else.

The rest is just as strong: the apocalyptic title track, Cash's own composition, plus Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus," Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water," and a closing "We'll Meet Again" that plays like a curtain call. He died the following year, months after his wife June.

Spread across two 180-gram LPs. The most powerful farewell album in American music.