TED Radio Hour - The Rhythm and Rhyme of Memory

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

Original broadcast date: July 29, 2022. For decades, Rosanne Cash has soared through the ranks of music with her powerhouse poetic skills and wistful reflections on her past. This hour, we explore Rosanne's life and legacy through her music.TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at: plus.npr.org/tedSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading.

From TED and NPR, I'm Minoosh Zamoroti. And if you've ever heard a song and instantly been transported back in time, you know the power of music to punctuate an event in your life, or distill a moment in history. Musician Roseanne Cash calls this the rhythm and rhyme of memory. And she says it's the force behind her songwriting. There's a mystery and a magic at the center of this process that's really undefinable and unexplainable. And when you touch that, you're touching something of the divine, this creative source.

That creative source has led her to record 15 albums over the past four decades and win four Grammy Awards. It also, she says, helped her accept the scrutiny that came with being the legendary Johnny Cash's daughter and more recently confront America's painful past, including her family's own role in that history. I often don't know what I feel or think, and I don't know how to process things, and I don't know what I want until I write about it. On this episode, we explore the links between memory and music with singer, songwriter, and musician Roseanne Cash, who is incredibly cool and fun.

and punctual. Wait a minute. It's exactly 9 a.m. And we're both recording and ready to go. How's that even possible? It's unheard of. And off we go. Roseanne Cash, hello, and thank you so much for being here.

Hi, Manuze. I'm thrilled to talk to you. So, Roseanne, I have to imagine that as the daughter of Johnny Cash, there was probably a good amount of music in your life as a child. Was it something that was just everywhere? I mean, I know that your dad had his first single put out just a couple months after you were born. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

About a month, actually. Yeah, it was in the house all the time. And not just what my father was playing, you know, Jimmy Rogers and Woody Guthrie and, you know, Hank Williams and all of the older country stars and Sister Rosetta Tharp and the Gospel in Blues. All of that was around. But then when my dad was on the road, what my mother played was also incredibly influential. She loved Patsy Klein. And then when I was old enough to discover the songs on the radio for myself, then it was the Beatles. I learned to love the Beatles and Patsy Klein and blues in Southern Gospel and Marty Robbins.

And, you know, Crosby stills, Nash and Young, it was all swirling around. In the talk you gave in 2021, which is called the rhythm and rhyme of memory, solitude, and community, you say that in your family, there was a song for every loss, every celebration, every unspoken need, every longing. And I guess I would think, wow, that is a family that is great at community. communicating with each other. But that was not necessarily the case, right? No. Well, what you just describe is the, if that was actually carried out, if that was actually

something that was happening, the idea that we could sit down and go, this is how I'm feeling and here's this song for it. No, what happened is that I found those songs for myself. They helped explain me to myself. You know, that indefinable longing or sadness or melancholy or hope or loss or thrill. There were songs for every most nuanced expression of all of those emotions. There are songs for each one, and I was able to find them. You know, there's something in my DNA that was attuned to that.

language. But my house was much more chaotic. I think that the music is how I made sense of a lot of things, and it was my particular kind of special cave that I went into. You know, my father was a drug addict in my early years. My mother was not equipped to handle either a partner who was a drug addict or fame. And those are the two things that kind of permeated our household. And then my mother's anger and fear and grief about all of those things. So there was not a lot of room for other emotion. And I think me and my sisters were, we didn't have anything explained to us. You know, they didn't talk to kids back then. There was no way they were going to sit down and say, look, your father's a drug addict and here's what's happening. No. So the confusion and fear,

you know, and children think, oh, this has to be my fault. It was complicated. What were some of the ways that you coped with having a dad who was so famous? The thing is, is that I, my family was so abnormal that I looked for what did normal families do? I loved the Little House on the Prairie series because, you know, the washing was on Monday and the baking was on Tuesday and you did this and you didn't wear this and you didn't speak like this. And I thought, okay, that's normal. And I wanted to create my own sense of normalcy. So if you didn't live in normal childhood and you were looking for normalcy, what are some of your first memories or what did you think you would grow up to become? Oh, I knew I would be a writer. I had a dream when I was 13 years old, and it was of my mother and my grandmother,

and they were sitting at a card table, and they were vacant, just vacant behind the eyes and wrote in their actions, and they kept putting cards slowly on the table to each other. And I woke up in a sweat at 13, and I said to myself, I will never be a card player. And I wrote my dad a letter. My dad was on the road about those impulses. I didn't want to live in that kind of deadening routine. I wanted to do something that touched the divine. I didn't use those words at that time.

But he wrote me back and he said, I see that you see as I see. Wow. And I held on to that. And I realized that there was a template for me to be who I. was in the world, and it wasn't to copy, but it was to explore and find myself. In some ways, my dad and I had a simpler relationship than I had with my mother. She saw that there was some kind of DNA thread that was similar to my dad's, that I was an artist.

And I think she saw that from a young age and it terrified her. So you started writing pretty early on. Yeah. Well, I did write poetry, starting from about the age of eight or nine. rhyme and language were already, even from the time I was three, my mother said, you asked what every word said and what it meant. So I was writing poetry all through my teens, and then at some point, this babysitter I had wrote to me, you know, like 10, 15 years ago and said, I babysat you, and I remember you said, how do you put poetry to music? I thought to myself,

Why was I asking her? I had a better authority in my own house. But yeah, that's what happened is that when I learned to play guitar, I started writing songs. And that was about age 18. You tell a story in your TED Talk about some writing you did when you were younger, this phrase that you came up with that ended up revisiting you later in life and really influencing you. Yeah. I was in my mid-30s and I was working on a song and my mom at the same time across the country was going through my school papers and drawings and, you know, things from childhood of mine that she had saved.

And she sent me this whole box. And I was leafing through the box and I came across this paper I had done in seventh grade on metaphors and similes. And I looked at this paper and it suddenly just washed over me the thrill I had felt in doing that paper was the first time that I had ever been excited about anything that they had asked me to do in Catholic school. And there was this metaphor I had written, A Lonely Road as a Bodyguard. This is a beautiful metaphor that I wrote at 12 years old. And it really moved me and struck me, and I just took that line and put it right in the song I was writing. The song's called Sleeping in Paris. Here's Roseanne Cash performing on the TED stage.

I'll send the angels to watch over you tonight, and you send them right back to me. A lonely road is a bodyguard. If we really want it to be. A lonely road is a bodyguard. What did it mean? I had even pasted a picture of this empty road next to the line. So my 12-year-old waved at me across the decades, saying that who I was was who I would become.

as painful as that was then and as it still could be painful now, I knew what she was telling me, that solitude can protect the seeds of creativity and that loneliness contains a priceless gift. If we can tolerate the initial discomfort and avoid the seduction of despair, We're all just radios hoping to pick up each other's signals. And some of those signals have a backbeat and a melody and they're universal.

And music can unlock a frozen memory that melts into the seeds of our creativity. And the reverse is also a true. A memory can unlock a song that's waiting. to be written. When we come back, more with Roseanne Cash, including a recent revelation about her mother that adds a twist to her family's history. I'm Manusse Zamoroti,

and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. Hey, before we get back to the show, I want to let you know that our next bonus episode for TED Radio Hour Plus is out soon. It's an extended interview with the psychologist just Hal Herschfield, on how we think about our future selves, why some of us struggle to plan for the future and what we can do about it. That's coming on Wednesday. Not a TED Radio Hour

supporter yet. Join your fellow listeners for bonus goodies and all of our episodes sponsor-free. Just go to plus.npr.org slash TED or give it a try right in the Apple Podcasts app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manus Zummerodi. And with me for the hour is Rosanne Cash. Hi, Roseanne. Hi, Manus. So we were talking about your dad, Johnny Cash.

In the 60s, he moved your family from Tennessee to California. But as you said, it was kind of a tough childhood as your father's success exploded. Your parents' relationship really suffered. And I think most people, know more about your dad's second wife, June Carter. But tell us about your mom, his first wife, Vivian, because she was a quiet but intense character. She wasn't very quiet at home. She was very intense. She's Sicilian, you know. She was very private and was not equipped to deal with my dad's sudden fame. Explosive fame.

And then his subsequent drug addiction, you know, in the 60s, it was like he would have to drive 200 miles and do three shows a night, you know, on these tours. And at some point, someone gave a pill to him and said, take this, it'll keep you awake, take this, and it'll help you sleep afterwards. And then that was it. So my mom was not prepared for that. And then, you know, the template she had later on when I went into, you know, became a songwriter and she realized that this was going to be my life path, she, her template for that was, oh, you get on drugs, you get divorced, your family falls apart, you're never home, you know, and she was terrified that that was going to be my life. Did you reassure her and say, no, I've learned from what not to do? No, I was not in the business of reassuring my mom anything at the age of 18. I just wanted to get away.

Just to step back for a second, in the beginning of your parents' relationship, they were madly in love. Absolutely. My dad was in the Air Force for three years, and my sisters and I have 1,000 letters they wrote to each other. Wow. That's crazy. A thousand. And is he saying, like, I'm going to be a big musical superstar? No, he was, it was mostly besotted teenage love, you know. I do, Vivian, I love you very much. I love you more than anything in the world. We'll be together soon. My darling, my darling, my darling. And then, you know, he would throw in, I bought this record. I bought a cheap guitar. I had a. I have a.

a little band with two of the other, you know, Air Force guys. So there were these sprinklings of what was being seated in him at that time. And so there was this period where your parents were really happy. Oh, yeah. I mean, until I was about six, I think. You know, it was great. They were in love. They were building a life together. Like you said, we moved to California when I was three from Memphis. And then things started falling apart. I had read the story. I knew in the history books that in 1965, your father was arrested in Texas for drug possession. But I didn't know the story that your mom went down to get him out of jail and that there's a famous photo that was taken as they left the courthouse. And the public had, I mean, outrageous reaction.

to this photo. Can you explain what happened? Well, it was a, you know, a photo in the newspaper not very pixelated as it was back then, and it was dark. And my mother's futures are Sicilian, and it appeared that she was African-American. And there was this outcry that my father had married a black woman. And the Ku Klux Klan started this campaign against my father to ban his records. And, you know, they excoriated him in the press. And it was this kind of, it got very intense and scary. And I didn't know what this was all about, but it was very frightening. And he had to, he wrote this letter, you know, saying that my mother was Italian. and, you know, this went on for a while.

And my mother was, like I said, so private. And she was extremely embarrassed by this attention, you know something about her appearance or about her history or her race. And that was incredibly hard for her to process. It was too much attention and in the wrong way. And there is actually another layer to the story because your mother always believed that she came from an Italian, American family. But you recently learned that there actually is some African heritage, too.

It's so fascinating. I did finding your roots a few years ago. And my mother's paternal side was indeed 100% Sicilian. They, you know, her grandparents immigrated from Sicily in the late 1900s and opened a store in San Antonio. All of this is well documented. But it turns out of out on her maternal side, whose history goes back deep in America, that in the 1840s, there was a freed slave married to, actually, I don't know if they could get married, but they were living as man and wife in Alabama in the 1840s. They had nine children together, and one of those children is my grandmother's, my maternal grandmother's direct ancestor. Yeah. It's an amazing coda to this chapter in your family's history. Was it on your mind when you wrote the song The Killing Fields? You sing about your family's southern roots and the history there of lynchings and racism in the South. It is haunting.

Yeah. So writing the Killing Fields was a slow awakening. And I do not claim to be awakened about it. race and about the suffering of African Americans and about the history of slavery. But I want to be awakened about it. There was cotton on the killing fields. It blows

down through the years. Sticks to me just like it burns. Fills my eyes and tears. And I had already been thinking about race My grandfather, Cash, had a deep threat of racism running through him. You know, Arkansas farmer, and he was not well educated and not making excuses for him. It's a very painful thing to acknowledge about him.

But I had been involved with the restoration of my dad's boyhood home in Arkansas for the past 12 years, 14 years. And going to Arkansas a lot, I became more aware of. the really dark, dark history of racism and violence in Arkansas. At around the same time, I was doing a show at Dockery Farms in Mississippi, which is really one of the birthplaces of the blues. It was a cotton farm where some of the great blues artists, Halen Wolf and Charlie Patton had picked cotton in the day and played guitar and music and juke joints at night.

So doing this show, there was an, after party, all white people at the after party. And this nearly 90-year-old black men playing blues harp with a guitarist, a white guitarist at the after party while the white people were milling around. And I kept looking at him all night. And I went over to him after the party to say, thank you so much, you know, that was so beautiful, really appreciating. And I appreciate you coming and playing. And he said, oh, I just want to tell you that when I was out behind the plow in the fields, that we had a radio sitting on the porch.

And whenever your daddy came on the radio in the 50s, I would run over to listen to him. And I started weeping. I was thinking about my racist grandfather across the river. in Arkansas behind the same kind of plow. And I realized that everything I do musically, creatively, that in some ways there's a thread that goes back to that black man behind the plow in Mississippi musically

and that white man behind the plow in Arkansas. And I started thinking about the threads you have to break in your life the ones you bind, the ones you break. Okay, so that reminds me of another story you tell in your TED Talk about your grandmother, Carrie Cash, and what it was like to be a woman in the South, the American South, a century or so ago. Yeah, so she had seven children, one who died when he was 14, but she gave birth at home with the assistance of a doctor who came by in a horse and buggy to check on her. One of her labors, she was in labor for three days. She came by on a horse and buggy to check on

her every day, once a day, and pulled two aspirin from his pocket to give her. It was the same pocket in which he kept his fishing worms. Wow. I know. Here's Roseanne Cash again on the TED stage. I read once that every time an old woman dies, a library disappears. And before her library disappeared, I tuned into my grandmother's signals and gleaned her tenacity, which I borrowed, and her long-suffering and her life of constant work with seven children, six of whom made it to adulthood, in a house without electricity,

and a sweltering cotton fields. and I wrote these words about her Five cans of paint In the empty fields And the dust reveals And the children Cry The work never ends

There's not a single friend It's a heavy toll Birds are cruel Wasting like fire The devil's scales work is done and the sunken There's five empty cans

You call that song The Sunkin Lands What are the Sunkin Lands, Rosanne? Yeah, Sunkin Lands That's the area of Arkansas Where my dad grew up Where they lived and it's called that Because there was an earthquake

In 1811 And the land sank And so it's still known As the Sunkin Lands And then, you know, I guess I do write quite a few songs about ancestry, history, family ties, which are broken, which are kept. I wrote a song, John wrote the music, my husband John, and I wrote the lyrics to the song called The Good Intent,

which was the first ship that the first cash ancestor came over. It was called The Good Intent. And I was thinking, that is such a great name. How could that not be in a song? So the Sunkin Lands and the Good Intent. I love this idea of some advice that you got that was to sing to the, I believe it was the 6% of the audience who are poets. Can you explain that one? So my friend John Stewart, who was a great songwriter and one of my mentors, he's gone now.

But I had had a bad night, you know, like I just couldn't connect with the audience so you could see some not paying attention. you know, whatever was going on. I was just out of time and space. I was not present. And I called him all anxious and complaining. And he said, yeah, on those nights, just sing to the 6% who are poets. But I've come to realize that even the other 94% need something. They've come for some reason.

It's because they want something from music and from that shared experience. So I respect 100% of the audience, not just the six. You'd written another song about this country's difficult history called Crawl Into the Promised Land, which also connects the past and the present, like the civil rights movement and the Black Lives Matter movement. But I have to say, Roseanne, my favorite line is when you sing, deliver me from tweets and lies and purify me in the sun. Okay, but come on, I have to ask, you are definitely on Twitter and you do not shy away from talking politics. So I don't know about this line.

You are pretty outspoken on a lot of things. You are super outspoken on ending gun violence in America, for example. What is your philosophy on being a musician and an activist? My political beliefs are empathy, period. I think all principles, at least for me, derived from empathy. My activism against gun violence, that's an extension of mothering. It's so simple to me. We're the grown-ups in the room.

We're required to protect children. That's, you know, full stop. That's it for me. Civil rights, the same. It's just if you can engender some kind of empathy, which I think music does, by the way. It reveals us to ourselves. you know, it gets us in touch with our feelings.

And if there's no empathy there, then there's no humanity. So tweets and lies. Tweets I wasn't talking about myself, Manus. In a moment, more of my conversation with Roseanne Cash, how science, specifically quantum physics, has influenced her songwriting and her ideas about her own future. I'm Manus Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TEDx Ted Radio Hour from NPR.

You'll be back in a sec. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manusse Zamorodi. My guest today is Roseanne Cash. A live surrounded by music. Singer, songwriter, Roseanne Cash. In the beginning of her career, she quickly rose through the ranks of country music. She's been performing since she was 18.

She had her first number one country hit in her mid-20s. But then Roseanne's switched tack and came up with her own unique sound. And she was binary, she was a rebel, there were so many different words that you could apply to her. Over the years, she toured the world while also raising a family. I mean, I go out and I come back a little bit or I take them with me. I'm a full-time mother. And all the while, she received numerous accolades.

This year, she is going to be a resident at Carnegie Hall. For artist rights, she was recently honored with the Spirit of Americana Free Speech Award. And believe it or not, the first woman to be awarded, the Edward McDowell Medal and composition. Hello, again, Roseanne Cash. Hello, Manus. I want to talk about a song that you play in your TED Talk. It is called Particle and Wave. And is it okay if we listen to it for just a woman?

Sure, of course. Gite is Particle. and wave Our history is written large upon the page The star in the love that fades to black Once revealed won't be taken back Light Nothing can escape

The ignorance we once forgave And the future if we don't decide to change the things we cannot see, but it slows to shine upon your face. We owe everything, everything, everything to this rainbow of suffering. Light is particle and refractions of this place. Reflections of our grace.

It reveals what we hold dear And it slows so I can hold you near Oh, Roseanne, this song is so beautiful Thank you. But it's also kind of a physics lesson, right? Like, is it true that you were thinking about theoretical physics when you wrote it? Yes, as you do. You lay on the sofa and think about quantum physics.

Quantum physics is like religion to me. And that is not to say I understand it at all. And that is why it's like religion to me. You know, if there is some higher power or some universal force, it gives me comfort to know that I don't understand it because then it is beyond my human understanding. But the language of quantum physics is so beautiful. Refractions, you know, mutual attraction, dark matter, the event horizon. And it's like a poet wrote this scientific discipline.

So I was just thinking about the power of love and the speed of light and whether the power of love was greater than the speed of light. And that's when I wrote the song. You write a lot about sort of going beyond time or linear time. I'm sort of wondering, you know, is it literally that space that you find when you are, alone and writing a song and looking backwards and looking forward and trying to figure out where you are, if anywhere now?

Well, it's funny. I just know I'm drawn to these paradoxes that I have written songs that are definitely outside linear time. I call them postcards from the future. And I've written songs that are memories of my ancestors. And I don't know how those things happen. I know that they do happen because I'm devoted to the art and process of songwriting, and that's what's available to me. But I love that.

The past can be changed by perspective. It's been nearly 20 years since your dad passed away. Does it feel like 20 years? Yes and no. It feels like he's still here, and it feels like he was never here. It feels like he belongs to the world as an iconic figure, and it feels like he was the guy who made ice cream on summer days in the backyard. But it's always been that way, you know. It's like there's a personal dad and there's a dad that the world owns.

And at some point in my late 20s, I realized that I had to be more gracious about the fact that the world also owned my dad. You've said that you know some people are attracted to you and your music because they're looking for a glimpse of your father and you. But you didn't deny them that you could have changed your name. You never did. I mean, it sounds like you were conflicted about being Johnny Cash's daughter, but you reconciled yourself to it pretty early on in your career. I don't know about that. I think I could have been gracious earlier in my life. And I used to resent it.

You know, I felt like a pain of glass that people were trying to look through to see my dad. And now I see it as part of my legacy. It's like, you know, your mom gives you a box of recipes. You don't go, I resent this. I mean, that's a kind of, you know, reductive. Well, maybe it's not reductive. Maybe it's the same. Well, what if it's the best cornbread recipe,

in the world. Absolutely. You owe it to share it with everyone. Absolutely. Potato salad. Let's talk about that. Okay. You know, whether it's my DNA, which I think it is, whether it's my environment,

which I think it is, whether it's his gift to me, if I don't take it, someone else will co-opt it and change the meaning. And that's what I realize, and that's why I wrote my memoir, actually. Your memoir, which is called composed, we should say. Are you going to write another one? by the way, because it's been, what, 12 years since it came out? Yeah, lots happen. My husband says I should call the next volume Decomposed. That is dark. It's dark. Oh, Mnuch, I love dark. I love dark. When I had brain surgery, I can't tell you the jokes I made to my friends about, you know, my brain,

my husband, too. It helped me get through it. Well, where does that sense of humor come from? Because it is kind of, I don't know, it's not American. No, it's not. It's Scottish. It's my Celtic thread. We're dark. We're melancholy. Oh, man, you know, I love those minor chords.

I got the McDowell Arts Medal in my speech. I said, I am an acolyte of the patron saint of minor cords. And it's true. I'm always drawn to melancholy. And so is my dad. So I have to think it's some kind of Scottish, you know, DNA. Which might explain why you have written and you sing a lot about grappling with loneliness and its flip side. Maybe we could say the more positive creative side, which is solitude.

Yeah. I don't necessarily think loneliness is always bad. And like you said, the creative acts that are inspired by solitude, that there are seeds of creativity in our solitude and in our memory. And, you know, sometimes that slides straight into loneliness. And I think the reason that a lot of particularly touring musicians or artists in general are lonely, it's because that that's where your work lies in your own heart and mind and psyche. And that's a singular experience that requires solitude.

And another layer of that is as a touring musician, you know, the constant motion and not making your own bed and not being grounded to a single place and time and the rush of people and places that go by you. And that's one reason I have a very complicated relationship with touring is I don't want to disappear into constant motion. I want to be grounded in my own home and not just physical. home, but I like rhythms that are a little slower so I can actually take them in. It's funny. I was thinking about how I've never been as lonely as I was in my 20s, but I have never wanted solitude so much as after I had kids. Isn't that the truth?

Yeah. They constantly take your pencil, don't they? Yes. How? How did you write so many songs as the... a mother to four, then five kids. Because I am a songwriter. It's not something I do. I'm a writer. It's what I am. At the same time, after having a baby, you know, there's that year and a half, two-year period where all of your creative energy goes into keeping that little thing alive.

And there's not much time for anything else. I used to get scared and like, oh my God, it's disappeared. I'm never going to create anything again. And then I realized that that's the rhythm of a life, you know. Yeah, you should give all your creative energy to that baby. And then then it changes. Then you have room and space for the solitude you're talking about. Okay, so we've talked a lot about the past. Can we talk about the future? Yes, tell me. You have, well, you have five adult children. Yeah. You have grandchildren. Yeah. What's their relationship to music, what will they sing about you, Roseanne? Oh, what a question.

That takes my breath away to think about that. I am not Roseanne Cash with my kids, you know, a mom and grandmother. And I am very disciplined about that, about not infusing my kids. motherhood, grandmotherhood with fame or this kind of public image of me. I try to keep it really grounded with them. And I hope I'm doing a good job with that. So the songs they would sing about me, I hope would be as a real mother and a real grandmother. It's interesting to think of the other young people in your life, a whole new generation, new listeners may find your music for completely different reasons. And I wonder if that's...

freeze you in some way? You know, I've been around long enough that I've, you know, carved my own space and I've followed my own muse and I've refined my own skills and I haven't tried to be a carbon copy and I'm proud of all of those things. And my friend just sent me a text the other day. He said, hey, I went to see Phoebe Bridgers at, you know, some stadium. and she played seven-year-ache as the walk-in music. I went, Phoebe Bridgers knows who I am.

My son said, of course she does, Mom, you don't realize she's a fan of yours. I'm going, oh, my God, you know, this is, I never expected. The truth is that I taught myself to never expect. I kept my head down. I wanted to be a better songwriter. a better songwriter. And I wanted to be successful in my own mind by being satisfied with the work I had done. You wrote once, and I wonder if you still feel this way, that every time you sit down to write a song, you're like, oh, what if this is it? What if I've reached my divine quota of good

songwriting and that that anxiety is uncomfortable, but that it also fuels you? It never leaves. I'm writing something now and I go, do I remember how to do this? And then suddenly a flood of something will come and I would go, oh yeah. No, I mean, I know I have some mastery over what I do now and I teach it sometimes. You know, I'm guest teachers in university about songwriting. And I can't teach young people to write songs, but I can teach them to be disciplined about, you know, dismantling their rhyme schemes and not using themes like love. and loss, but actually to talk about the specifics, which is where the originality is.

But I can't help them develop their own mastery. That takes time and devotion. You're in your 60s now. Oh, my God. It happened. It's shocking. I mean, do you think you'll keep touring into your 70s? No, I want to wind down.

I want to do other things. So right now, I'm writing the lyrics to a musical. I'm the lyricist. My husband, John, is the composer. We have a wonderful book writer. We're in production now. We're in choreography rehearsals. And we have rehearsals and eight performances this fall.

And this is six years of work. What's it about? It's Norma Ray. I'm sure you remember the story. You know, it's really about a woman's transformation set in the framework of union organizing. Very timely. So timely. And I love it.

And I'm still excited. You know, I'm in my 60s. I am not jaded. I am still really curious about what's next and excited when I write something I think is good. And I want to see what's next. And I know that the wall of mortality is, you know, brick by brick. It's there. And it gives me a sense of urgency.

You mentioned, as you said in your talk, that some songs have been postcards from your future. Yeah. Have you been getting any postcards recently? Yeah. I often don't know what I feel or think until I write about it. And there are themes that have repeated my entire life that I'm coming to the end of. that I have sorted through that I don't have to do anymore

and there are other themes that are rising up about mortality and about settling scores in myself about guarding against bitterness I see that it's easy to become bitter or resentful as you get older if you don't achieve what you wanted to

and I've learned that bitterness gives you wrinkles and I don't want anymore. So, but yeah, postcards from my future, they're very urgent. They're telegrams, not postcards. Roseanne Cash, thank you so much. Thanks, Manus. I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much.

That's Roseanne Cash. You can see her full TED performance at TED.com. Thank you for listening to our show today. This episode was produced by Ramel Wood, and it was edited by Rachel Faulkner and Katie Simon. Our production staff at NPR also includes Katie Montalione, James Delahousie, Matthew Cloutier, Fiona Gereyn, Fiona Gereyn, and Catherine Seifier. Our audio engineer is Stu Reshfield. Our theme music was written by Romteen, Arablewey. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Feelin, Michelle Quint, Sammy Case, and Danielle Ballerzzo.

I'm Anush Zamoroti, and you've been the last. listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.