Thirty years after 'The Wheel,' Rosanne Cash, John Leventhal still making beautiful music

Amy Paige Condon, Savannah Morning News

Updated March 28, 2024 at 8:20 AM·5 min read

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In the title song to the 1993 album The Wheel, Rosanne Cash wrote, “I’m not looking for the answers/Oh, darling, don’t you see/That just to know the question/Is good enough for me,” – a nod, she says, to Ranier Marie Rilke’s admonition to a young poet to love and live the questions.

That budding poet writing to Rilke in 1903 was all kinds of unsettled about his future, as Cash was 30-plus years ago when she penned those words. With a toddler on her hip, she left Nashville for New York City, leaving her 13-year marriage to singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell as she contended with intense affection for John Leventhal, the producer of her groundbreaking album. Life was full of uncertainty and all she could do at the time was trust her inner voice, which spoke through some heavy “emotionally violent” metaphors.

Writing, whether lyrics, essays or books, is the way Cash organizes her inner life. “I don’t know what’s troubling me from the past until I write about it. I don’t know what to hope for in the future. In the future, I don’t know the depth of something that’s happened, that’s affected me, until I write about it.”

After some frustrating months, everything worked out.

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Cash and Leventhal have been married for nearly three decades, and Crowell often plays on stage with them. And the masters for The Wheel returned to Cash last year, giving her and Leventhal an opportunity to release a deluxe pearl anniversary edition under their own label, Rumble Strip — which also happens to be the name of Leventhal’s debut album, released in January after years of writing songs, producing and playing on other artists’ records.

She thought the songs might sound dated after all this time, coming from a much younger version of herself. “They are dated but not in a way that makes me cringe anymore,” Cash says. “I’m proud of them. Singing the truth about yourself with John on stage, my heart just melts. I just wanted to be with him so badly.

“And now, this song was knocking on his door, and look what happened. The door opened and we’ve been together for 30 years now, and it’s really moving to me sometimes. I tear up singing these songs.”

Those songs and more will be part of the setlist she and Leventhal will perform when they return to the Hostess City on April 3 for a show at the Lucas Theatre for the Arts as part of the 35^th Savannah Music Festival. Also on display will be the gifts each of them brings to the stage that have held them together all this time: her words and his music.

“We strengthen each other,” Cash says. “You know, I think that a lot of time it’s greater than the sum of its parts.”

What the future holds

In the deluxe edition of the Rumble Strip Records reissue, Cash admits during a live recording of a 1993 episode of the Columbia Radio Hour to being a closeted fan of show tunes. She launches into a tender rendition of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” from My Fair Lady that taps into the song's ache and yearning for a better life.

It begs the question if there is an album of re-imagined Broadway melodies in the offing. The answer is no. She is, however, writing the lyrics to Leventhal’s music for Norma Rae, a musical based upon the Academy Award-winning 1979 film starring Sally Field as a textile mill worker who fights to unionize for better working conditions and wages. It’s a timely story, Cash explains, about a woman’s transformation, finding community and change.

Cash enjoys writing for other voices and characters not her own. “[It] is really interesting and challenging, writing songs that I won’t sing. I kind of love that,” she says. “I love being in a writers’ room or rehearsal room and it not being about me. There’s some real liberation in that.”

Even though her voice at 68 remains as clear and strong as ever, she sees herself collaborating more as she grows older. “A lot of people like the older voice…but that’s not me. I want to go out at my top and do some other projects.”

She thinks Leventhal has found his “groove,” too, describing the music he’s crafted for the production as a “marriage of Sondheim and Appalachia.”

The whole process is stretching and building new muscle, she says. “To write in the voices of people whose lives were very different from mine, and a whole other generation, and not condescend in any way, but just find what their poetry is.”

Cash finds poetry in a lot of places. She is writing songs for a new album with Blue Note Records and penned the forewords to two books. She just finished sewing a baby blanket, having taken up needlework during the making of 2014’s Grammy-winning The River and the Thread. That album was borne from repeated road trips through the South, exploring her past and her father Johnny Cash’s childhood home.

She found herself missing him on stage last year when she was singing with Kris Kristofferson at Willie Nelson’s 90^th birthday concert at the Hollywood Bowl. “I wished my dad had been one of those guys in their late 80s. Willie’s 90, and they’re still doing it and taking the joy, and the light falls on them on stage. And they soak it in without any kind of self-consciousness or expectation – it just falls on them. I missed my dad that night – a lot.”

Cash finds herself wishing she could ask her mom and dad questions just to help navigate life. At the same time, she’s come “to let go of control, to try to keep my hands out of the machinery of the universe,” perhaps, even, to live the questions.