Johnny Cash - American Recordings

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.

This is where it started, in 1994: just Cash and an acoustic guitar, recorded mostly in Rubin's living room and at Cash's cabin. "Delia's Gone" opens with a murder ballad delivered flat and cold, Nick Lowe's "The Beast in Me" and Tom Waits's "Down There by the Train" reveal themselves as Cash songs all along, and Glenn Danzig wrote "Thirteen" specially for him.

It won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album and reintroduced Cash to an audience that had never bought a country record in its life.

Pressed on 180-gram vinyl with a download card. The starting point of an extraordinary final decade.