Check out, Sea Of Heartbreak, with Rosanne Cash and Bruce Springsteen.

I get the celebrity of it and all: The Boss.

But truth be told, I’d rather sing with Rosanne Cash if I had to choose. 😉

I had read about him in Melody Maker, like everyone else in the music business in London, but I had not yet heard his music. I was sitting at the bar at the Hard Rock, Dubonnet in hand, when “Born to Run” came on the sound system. Sandy was talking to me, but I could not hear a word she was saying, so riveted was I to the music. The combination of urgency, poetry, testosterone-fueled guitars, and the relentless backbeat made me literally weak in the knees. It was as if William Blake had put on black leather and climbed a motorcycle. I was enraptured. I couldn’t begin to conceive that, thirty-three years later, I would do a duet with Bruce Springsteen on my album The List. That concept belonged to someone else’s life in 1976, not the shy, round girl sitting at the bar of the Hard Rock Cafe in London.

– Rosanne Cash, Composed (Amazon)

Can you imagine Johnny Cash recommending a list of country songs to study?!

On my list?

• I’ve Always Been Crazy, By: Waylon Jennings
• Crazy, By: Patsy Cline
• Hey Good Lookin’, By: Hank Williams

What songs would be on yours?

Then, when I was a day out of high school, my father took me on the road. It was something of a graduation gift, and a chance to catch up on some of the time we had lost. Traveling the world, watching him perform, and singing on the bus were also the basis for a serious education. Early on he made a list of a hundred essential country songs, which he instructed me to learn, a wide-ranging selection that ran from old history-lesson songs like “The Battle of New Orleans” to classics like Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” As I was ushered into this treasury of song, it was thrilling to learn more about my father through his great love for the music.

– Rosanne Cash, Composed (Amazon)