Bird On A Wire. Johnny Cash. 2003. Universal.

Self incrimination in popular song is the comedy of introspection. It differs from the confession only inasmuch as where the latter is a process of disburdenment, the incrimination of self is cumulative, acquiring personal facts that serve as evidence of the artist’s wrongdoing. Songwriters who practice this delicate art are balanced mercurially over a surplus of pity on one side and obsessive indulgence on the other. Leonard Cohen, already a published poet and novelist when he began his recording career in 1967, tells us the secret of this performative dance, saying, “I saw a young man leaning on his wooden crutch. And he called out to me, ‘Don’t ask for so much.’

And a young woman leaning in her darkened door. She cried out to me, ‘Hey, why not ask for more?’” When Johnny Cash puts these words into his mouth they acquire a remedial American authority that not only predates the commercial rock and roll era, but that also elevates Cohen’s great ballad of personal failings and strength into a universal truth. Born in 1932, Cash was one of our last living witnesses to an infant country whose emerging musical identity still largely belonged then to the economic and social class of poor who had only recently had the demands of modernity thrust upon it. He carried in his famous bass-baritone a musical, vocal idea of what we’ve come to mythologize about that mysterious era, stirring in us some primal, native quiddity that will probably be lost to current and forthcoming generations. What remains vital about both artists are shared qualities they possess that illuminate their best work in a similar but paradoxical style; Cohen was a master ironist who never abandoned unfeigned hope for humanity in his poetry, and Cash was a vigilant model of hope who unfailingly acknowledged the grimmest ironies of his age.  Theirs was an exemplary, inevitable marriage of sensibilities.