Rosanne Cash
I couldn't listen to music with lyrics for the first few months after the brain surgery, because they were too complex and disturbing. So I listened to a lot of classical music. I didn't really want to read, either, so I listened to books on tape or watched movies. I also re-taught myself all of my childhood piano pieces. It helped me repair my brain.Collection: Book
I'm not the type to turn to drugs and alcohol, but I do have a profound devotion to art and music - and children.Collection: Art
As I started writing about loss and grief, I was taking what felt unmanageable and using my songwriting, my sense of poetry and discipline, to try and make it manageable.Collection: Grief
I was a songwriter; that was the torch I carried. This is an honorable profession. This is what I do.Collection: Torches
I wanted to be a songwriter.I didn't so much want to be a performer.I more grew into that just from being a songwriter.Collection: Want
I gave up language for a while, and I started painting.And then I only listened to Miles Davis and other instrumental music to see how it felt to be without words.Collection: Painting
I wanted to be the writer in the room setting depth charges of feeling out the world with my language.You know, I had a very romantic idea about that.But I grew into being a performer.Collection: Ideas
While visiting places in the South with my heart really open, I realized how important people in certain geographical spots were to me, what they symbolize, how I'm still connected to them and how much they are a part of my ancestry, both musical and real.Collection: Real
My dad and I had a real meeting of the minds. We loved to talk about music, politics, and art. He loved children. The thing I missed most about my dad when he died was that this person who really gets who I am at the core was gone.Collection: Art
Think about all of the families where the father is a doctor and the son is a doctor or generations of coal miners. Why did they go into that line of work? Because that's what they were taught. Or was it in their genes? It's not an either/or question. It's both. I was inclined in that way. I was sensitive to music and poetry, and it was around me growing up.Collection: Growing Up
Sarah Palin is a great example of someone that just stirs the pot for the sake of the attention. No vision, no critical thinking, no backup to her statements. Just to incite little riots everywhere and capitalize upon it financially. To me, she is a microcosm of the ultimate cynicism in American politics.Collection: Thinking
I think any young person who is going into the same field as their parent whose parent has been very successful, it's complicated.And it was complicated for me.Collection: Successful
I spent nearly two hours deciding on an outfit that would look as if the subject of clothing had never crossed my mind, but would in fact show off my best features and miraculously hide the extra pounds.Collection: Two
Sometimes the fragment of a conversation, the color of the sky, the image in a dream, has everything to do with where the song begins.Collection: Music
If I ignore my work, I start having anxiety attacks.Collection: Anxiety
I was down with Lucinda Williams and Mary Chapin-Carpenter. We did an acoustic tour, just the three of us, three chicks and three guitarsCollection: Guitar
If you're playing in a tradition and you have no reference point to it, no understanding and have not studied it, I can't respect that.Collection: Understanding
I needed to carve out my own place and find out what I was going to doCollection: Needed
You stand in front of a great painting and your heart just opens and your mind expands about what's possible. That, to me, is a connection to what God is.Collection: Heart
I have a real worker-bee mentality. Just show up, just do it. Even if you feel like s--t and you think you're terrible and you'll never get better and it will never go anywhere, just show up and do it. And, eventually, something happens.Collection: Real
Isn't that the goal, as you grow older? That you start reclaiming those parts of yourself you didn't recognize or didn't think were there all along? That's what happened when I made The River and the Thread record.Collection: Thinking
I'm a songwriter. My voice just serves what I'm writing about. So to let all that go, I mean, bring the sensibilities of it actually to the song choices, but to just be the interpreter was incredibly liberating and really fun.Collection: Song
"Country" has become a marketing term. I see myself as a songwriter.Collection: Country
Celtic music is part of the language in Scotland and Ireland, where every kid and grandparent knows those songs, music by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Hank Snow is getting entrenched here. They are part of our cultural language. It's part of a living treasure. It doesn't just belong to a museum.Collection: Song
I was angry at my parents when I had to have brain surgery, that they weren't still around, because no matter how old you are you want you parents when you're going through something like that.Collection: Parent
When I was eleven I stopped dreaming the dreams that didn't come true, I stopped talking to people who didn't listen, I lost hope and I retreated. I assumed that the root of the problem was that I was too strange for the real world. That being the case, I created a charming and dynamic personality to make the necessary forays into the Outside, and I kept my strangeness for myself; my own peculiar jewels under lock and key.Collection: Dream
He [Johnny Cash] was so fragile. We invaded Iraq in March, and he died in September. And because his health was so fragile, he couldn't take the controversy of making a public statement against the war. He knew that people were rabid. They attacked me mercilessly after I did the press conference with Musicians United to Win Without War. He knew that he couldn't tolerate that.Collection: War
When I was 18 years old, I went on the road with my dad after I graduated from high school. And we were riding on the tour bus one day, kind of rolling through the South, and he mentioned a song. We started talking about songs, and he mentioned one, and I said I don't know that one. And he mentioned another. I said I don't know that one either, Dad, and he became very alarmed that I didn't know what he considered my own musical genealogy.Collection: Song
Southern gentility is evocative to me.Collection: Southern
Being in Vietnam changed him [Johnny Cash] fundamentally. He was devastated when we went into Iraq.Collection: Iraq
Work ... is redemption.Collection: Work
With time the unbearable becomes shocking, becomes sad, and finally becomes poignant.Collection: Grief
On the plane, an eight-year-old with an excess of testosterone keeps running across my feet. Finally I grab him by his T-shirt and say, very sweetly, 'Listen, darling, if you don't stop trampling me I'm going to make you sit on my lap while I tell you my entire life story. Including a lot of details about drug rehab and my divorce.' He goes back to his seat.Collection: Running
Self-expression without craft is for toddlers.Collection: Self
I have learned to be steady in my course of love, or fear, or loneliness, rather than impulsive in its wasting, either lyrically or emotionally.Collection: Loneliness
I was sensitive to music and poetry, and it was around me growing up.Collection: Growing Up
I think that my sensitivity to music has actually deepened and expanded as I've gotten older. You add more life experience.Collection: Thinking
I’m a songwriter. My voice just serves what I’m writing about. So to let all that go, I mean, bring the sensibilities of it actually to the song choices, but to just be the interpreter was incredibly liberating, really fun.Collection: Fun