Rosanne Cash – The Essential Rosanne Cash Legacy 88697 82710 2 (2011)
Rosanne was always a country artist, but really her interests lay elsewhere much of the time. The template for much of her career is Willie Nelson‘s Stardust. Willie took traditional pop ballads and gave them an extremely light country treatment. Rosanne was much younger than Willie, so she instead looked to AM radio light rock of the early 1970s and popular rock of much of the 1960s to the 1980s to some extent too and gave those sources a light country/folk touch. She avoided entirely the kind of affected half-yodel country singing that was popular throughout her career. This particular collection tracks mostly her singles. It seems to omit certain fan favorite album tracks, perhaps because they are too edgy for commercial radio and weren’t selected as singles. This is all pleasant music, even if it is a little plain much of the time. It is marked with impeccable professionalism and fine craftsmanship throughout, full of rich and varied sonic palettes that would usually be incongruous with music this sombre and plaintive. Really, though, Rosanne got better with time, and her later albums like Black Cadillac had a bit more character than much of what came before, which makes this collection somewhat premature for an artist still recording stuff that is as good as she ever has since this was released.