Sheryl Crow has been talking about her experience of reccording her posthumous duet with the late great Johnny Cash, which was released back in 2019.
Redemption Day was a song that Crow originally wrote for her self-titled 1996 album that was inspired by a visit to war-torn mid-'90s Bosnia. Cash picked up on the song and recorded it with Rick Rubin in 2003, before he died in the September of that year. It was eventually released on his posthumous American VI: Ain’t No Grave album.
“Johnny Cash wanted to record it,” she recalled on the No Small Endeavor podcast. “He asked me all these questions about it and he recorded it and then he passed away. And so years later, I thought, 'you know what I want to recreate this song’. So I called his son and Roseanne and said, ‘I want to recreate it for today’ because I feel it matters more now. So I played it and we put his demo vocal on it. I didn’t want to put my voice on it but the producer was like ‘you have to sing it, it’s your record!’”
“So I’m standing in the vocal booth one night and I felt Johnny’s presence. I am not a woo-woo, but I felt his presence pushing me, helping me find my way through it. It was such an odd thing. So to get to do that, I feel the blessing in it.”
Crow also talked about her recovery from breast cancer. “Having breast cancer saved my life,” she said. “I had perfected being the ultimate care-taker of all people, of everything, the people pleaser and I was at the bottom of the list of people that I took care of. I was in a relationship that was challenging and slightly toxic.
“I got diagnosed but I knew I wasn’t going to die, but it definitely got my attention. My radiologist said ‘I hope you get the tailor-made life lesson that every cancer survivor gets’ and I did. My lesson was to start putting myself first. Learn to say no.”
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