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In March 2014, Johnny Cash will put out a new album.
The previously unreleased LP was recorded by the legendary musician in the early Eighties and tucked away for years, forgotten. Cash’s estate released a trailer to promote the album, Out Among the Stars, which contains 12 never-before-heard studio recordings, including duets with Cash’s wife, June Carter Cash, and Waylon Jennings.
The trailer is short, but sweet, featuring Cash’s son, John Carter Cash, who recalls finding the songs buried in the Sony Music Archives. The tracks were recorded in Nashville, Tennessee in 1981 and 1111 Sound Studios in 1984, both with producer Billy Sherrill for Columbia Records. The recordings were apparently forgotten about after Cash released his final Columbia LP, Rainbow, in 1985. John Carter Cash discovered the tapes in 2012 while cataloging his parents’ recordings. “They were beautiful,” he says in the teaser trailer of the songs he uncovered.
“We were so excited when we discovered this,” Cash told the Associated Press. “We were like, my goodness this is a beautiful record that nobody has ever heard. Johnny Cash is in the very prime of his voice for his lifetime. He’s pitch perfect. It’s seldom where there’s more than one vocal take. They’re a live take and they’re perfect.”
The trailer includes a few seconds of a previously unreleased track called “She Used To Love Me A Lot,” which seems to prove the younger Cash’s sentiment that the songs are beautiful, with a dark and haunting tone similar to his critically-acclaimed album, American Recordings.
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