Jovial, randy and anything but dark: Johnny Cash’s surprise return single Well Alright reviewed
Rescued from Cash’s low ebb in the early 1990s, this fun, lightweight song is a long way from the moody recordings with Rick Rubin he soon turned towards
...A jovial tale of a hook-up in a launderette that ultimately leads to marriage, filled with winking lines – “I opened up the dryer and I set it on soft and light / She said ‘be careful with my silk and lace’ and I said ‘well, alright’” – it arrives decorated with twanging reverb-heavy electric guitar, upright bass and Cash’s preferred boom-chicka-boom rhythm. It’s fun and lightweight, more in the vein of his 1976 hit One Piece At a Time than the songs that, as his daughter Rosanne once put it “reflected the sadness, the convulsions … that mythic dark night of the soul that he went through so many times”.
It’s good enough to make you believe that Cash’s 1993 demos don’t deserve to languish in obscurity, without ever suggesting his career would have blossomed again in the way it did without Rick Rubin’s vision: had it been released shortly after it was recorded, it would doubtless have met the same fate as the singles taken from 1991’s The Mystery of Life.
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