When asked for the story behind this week’s posthumous release of Johnny Cash’s Out Among the Stars, a “lost” album recorded in the early ’80s with fabled Nashville producer Billy Sherrill, his son, John Carter Cash, quickly reels off a laundry list of reasons.
“It seemed to be a cohesive body of work,” Cash, 44, said from the family’s headquarters in Hendersonville, Tenn. A few years ago he came across the never-released recordings while organizing the bounty of archival materials left behind by his father and his mother, June Carter Cash, after their deaths in 2003. “Working with [project co-producer] Steve Berkowitz,” he said, “it struck us as a unique and beautiful Johnny Cash record.”
But more than that, Out Among the Stars,/em> is a strongly personal project for John Carter Cash, the only child of Johnny and June. “When these tapes were rediscovered and I heard them again, I was reminded of this man who was my friend,” said Cash, who was 14 when most of the album’s songs were recorded in 1984. “He and I were very close in 1980s. So it’s a really personal connection for me to hear this.”
Read more at the Los Angeles Times. In addition, John Carter Cash speaks about each of the tracks on the new album in interviews at The Guardian and Billboard.