American IV: The Man Comes Around

Better than Coldplay

Opens really great with The Man Comes Around and Hurt. He’s at his best in the songs that fit with the grizzly-voiced rebel aesthetic he’s known for. In My Life doesn’t work for me and some of the other curve balls don’t always hit. Great arrangements and performances by Tom Petty backers Mike Campbell and Belmont Tench.

Hurt does a lot of heavy lifting to make this a ‘classic’ album. ‘The Man Comes Around’ is great too - the rest just feel like pretty nice covers. The Rick Rubin production gets predictable too.

Favorite songs: Sam Hall, Streets of Laredo, Tear Stained Letter, Personal Jesus, Hurt, We'll Meet Again, Danny Boy, Desperado, I Hung My Head, Give My Love to Rose, In My Life, The Man Comes Around , I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry

Least favorite songs: First Time I Saw Your Face

5/5

Elegiac late Johnny Cash. His voice is aged but still powerful. Johnny’s takes on some of his older songs along with covers shows an artist still pushing himself to create something meaningful.

Pretty nice covers sung by Johnny Cash

One the greatest American albums ever made. Cash has such an impressive catalog that its odd to me his best body of work is a posthumous release of cover songs. 6/5, would listen to this album on any given day

I cannot abide country music. I know Johnny Cash has become this larger than life, beloved by all, Americana-type figure, but I've never understood why. What I will say is that this doesn't really sound like country music. It's not weird and twangy. This may be because most (all?) of the songs are covers from better artists. That said, though it's too long and Cash's voice is very much the same through every song, it's not terrible. 2.5 stars, probably, but I'll give it an extra half star because Hurt is an awesome video, even though the original song is better.

Great Singer, great Album!

love a late career renaissance album. especially when it comes with an evolutionary step that suits their age and the times.

i'd be lying if i called myself a nine inch nails fan, but i’m a fan of johnny cash covering nine inch nails from what sounds like a dungeon cell. sounds like a goya painting. music for a mccarthy novel.

“the man comes around” is so good it’s like you’ve known it your whole life. perfect song to go out on.

most of it works. “i’m so lonesome i could cry” is one of the best songs ever written. personal jesus is great. it’s enthralling to hear his old voice RIGHT THERE. the production is awesome.

bridge over troubled water teeters on the edge of not working, but you're rooting for the old timer the whole time, aren't you?

damn your eyes!

Gonna be honest, although this has nothing to do with the quality because it's a good album, but this album probably shouldn't be on the list.

Fundamentally I just dont think albums that are primarily covers albums should be on the list. But that's just me.

That said, yeah, still a good album that I think is heavily buoyed by his magnificent cover of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt. Brutally haunting reinterpretation of the song.

Most of the rest of the album is solid country/folk songs that vary in quality in comparison to their originals (at least the ones I've heard before), but they're never unnecessary I feel. For example, Bridge Over Troubled Waters is solid, but the original Simon & Garfunkel is better and Cash's cover doesn't particularly stand out (although nice to have Fiona Apple on Cash's cover). Same with In My Life.

Can 100% understand where the idea of the Personal Jesus cover came up. Similar to him covering Soundgarden's Rusty Cage, they just recognized that the song is basically a country track, and went with it. Basically, the best covers are the ones where he takes a song from outside his wheelhouse and reinterprets them, as opposed to straight covers of folk/country tunes.

The originals are solid too, Give My Love to Rose is great.

But overall, with the exception of Hurt, it's just good.

The gold standard for late career (and late life) albums. The American recordings were truly special, and Johnny Cash absolutely cemented his legacy with this one.

American IV: The Man Comes Around was an album that i actually liked quite a fair bit. I was pretty surprised to learn that this album was just covers (with one original song) but these covers are some pretty good covers. This album also seems to have songs from some of my favorite albums on this list like Hurt from Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral, Personal Jesus from Depeche Mode's Violator, and Bridge Over Troubled Water from Simon And Garfunkel's album of the same name. While i do like the original versions of all those songs more than these covers, I still cannot deny that they are very good and the other songs were quite good as well. Definitely a really good listen.
Best Song: Personal Jesus
Worst Song: Tear Stained Letter
Side note: Am i the only one who thinks that Johnny Cash's lineup of albums on this list is a little weird? He has 2 live albums and 1 studio album 99% consisting of covers.

It's no small success that Cash has me appreciating a Trent Reznor song, but this album is far more than a qualification of my aesthetic preferences. That's b/c American IV is such a powerful and strange cover album, hardly feeling like one in the end. Not only does Cash make other's art his own - he universalizes his selected tracks, and each song seems to be no one's in particular. The democratic choice to disperse a few of his own songs throughout gives the sense that he is merely one of so many conduits thru which art is expressed. The whole world is the writer of poetry in the end, as Emerson reminds us: "For poetry was all written before time was." But this is also Cash qua Cash, the voice being so recognizable, so ineluctable.

It's good but I have a public service announcement to issue. 'Hurt' will always be Trent Reznor's song. The thousands and thousands of people who say otherwise are very, very wrong. You can't hear the pain with Johnny Cash. You can't hear the heartbreak with Johnny Cash. You don't hear the personal autobiography of a tortured soul with Johnny Cash. You don't hear the deep, dark place that this song came from with Johnny Cash.

We all know what this is. We all know the story.
The tracks are great - Hurt is off the charts - but it's a long album, and I really didn't need to hear Cash covering Bridge over Troubled Waters.

The Good: It’s always nice when the man comes around!
The Bad: Except when you’re not ready for the visit…
The Ugly: Guess the man won’t come around no more…

What? Johnny Cash? Singing [mostly] other people’s tunes? In his style? And everybody loves it?

I’d heard about Hurt. Always wondered about what happened to his career, as he’d stopped being a lead actor, and started doing supporting roles… Oh wait, not that Hurt…

Johnny Cash is an icon. Almost everyone in born until 1990 will most likely know of him, after that, well, I guess we can blame Joachim Phoenix for that…
Myself, I have never understood the persona. Not a fan of his work. But that sure as shit was a nice cover of Bridge Over Troubled Water!

So, 3*

I’m at another 10.

I’ve only ever known the cover of “Hurt” from this album – it’s immensely famous, and it’s a track that Johnny Cash basically stole, in brilliant fashion. I never knew it was only the second track here, though. I’ve always assumed it was the closer, because it feels so poignant and so… final. I’m so very, very glad that it’s not though, because this album is structured in such a way that it works perfectly in conjunction with “The Man Comes Around” as the opener, and arguably creates a narrative throughout where Johnny is trying to atone for those sins so present and so fruitfully captured on that cover of “Hurt”. From Simon & Garfunkel, to Sting, to Depeche Mode, & ironically enough, the Eagles, as well as scattering of rerecordings of covers he already did, it’s just a stellar 51 minutes. It leaves me with the same sense of “getting it” as I had after listening to Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged album. I truly do get what Johnny Cash meant to people now, and in particular, what he likely meant to my dad.

The thing that strikes me the most about this album, besides the excellent song choices to cover, most of which I’ve never actually heard the originals of, is in its intimacy. There’s no bombastic backing bands here & no intense instrumentation (save for the piano on “Hurt”) – just pure, stripped down music, left to the barebones machinations of a guitar, whatever else was lying around, and Johnny Cash’s voice. In this gravelly, withered state, it arguably sounds more impactful here than at any other point in his life. It’s the core instrument, and it’s on full, vulnerable display. It gives each and every track a gravitas that has only ever been matched, to my ears, by Leonard Cohen on “You Want It Darker”, and even then, Johnny’s vocals still have a musicality and a natural charisma to them that elevates them higher.

If there is a God, which Johnny Cash so desperately prays to throughout this album, then let him bless Rick Rubin for making sure Johnny Cash still had a voice throughout the final 7 to 8 years of his life, & bless Johnny Cash for just laying it all out on what he knew would likely be his final album in his lifetime. It’s a gift, a treasure, and a privilege to listen to this, truly. Easy, easy 10.

it was fiine, but I don't think this comes close to the prison lives.
Bunch of covers too.
Still, a strong 3

Thanks, I didn't *want* to cry today...