Johnny Cash's final album "American V: A Hundred Highways" (American/ Lost Highway) is a heartbreaker.
Even without the back story of it being The Man in Black's final album - written and recorded between November 2002 and Sept. 12, 2003, the day Cash died of complications from respiratory failure - "American V" would still be a stunning meditation on death and dying.
The 12 tracks don't all deal with death - whether to accept or fight it. But it is almost tangible on the album. It hangs in the air, informing his song choices, his delivery and, especially, his voice.
On Cash's version of Hugh Moffatt's "Rose of My Heart," he is clearly singing, "We're the best partners this world's ever seen, together as close as can be," to his wife, June Carter Cash, who died four months before he did. In a lesser singer's hands, the song could sound cheesy with a chorus of "You are the rose of my heart, you are the love of my life."
But Cash's low, booming voice, used as he had throughout his nearly five-decade career, makes the lines sound authoritative - as if there could be no question he was speaking the truth.
With little more than an acoustic guitar and a piano to back him up, Cash turns Rod McKuen's "Love's Been Good to Me" into a stirring love song. He reconfigures Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind" breakup song into an epic, filling the lines "The feeling's gone and I just can't get it back" with such regret that they make you listen to the song in a totally different way.
Cash takes "Further On (Up the Road)" away from Bruce Springsteen in much the same way he turned Trent Reznor's "Hurt" into his own. Cash gives "Further On," from Springsteen's "The Rising" (Columbia), a far more hopeful feel, a promise of something better that doesn't exist in the original.
"Like the 309," the last song Cash ever wrote, follows in his tradition of train songs, from "Folsom Prison Blues" on, and includes the liveliest lines on the album, as he sings, "Hey sweet baby, kiss me hard, draw my bathwater, sweep my yard" with the swagger of his more youthful days.
Obviously, legendary artists such as Cash don't come around every day, but neither do producers such as Rick Rubin, artists in their own right who take stewardship of others' creativity very seriously.
Rubin could easily have shoveled this album out, packaged it in the buzz of the "Walk the Line" movie, milking it for every cent he could, the way so many proud businessmen would do. Instead, he completed his hero's work meticulously well, with a minimum of overdubs and an understated musical grace that keeps all the talk of death from collapsing in on itself.
The resulting work is worthy of one of music's highest compliments: "American V: A Hundred Highways" can proudly stand against Johnny Cash's best work. (Grade: A)