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An acoustic guitar and the deep, powerful voice of the man in black. That’s all you need to make an outstanding album. That is proven by this, the first in a series of (at least) five albums, released on producer-legend Rick Rubin’s label. It might not sound like it on paper (what the heck, it sure does sound good on paper as well!), and the first few listens may feel a bit strange and barren at least if you don’t know what to expect, but once you get accustomed to the stripped-down and minimalistic approach of the album, you’ll start to discover how excellent it is.

What I most liked on this album is that you can hear the experience and the life lived in the voice of Johnny Cash on this album. You recognise it as the same Johnny Cash who recorded all those classics back in the ‘50’s, but the passage of years has left its marks on his voice. And it’s not a bad thing at all, I think. You can sense it in the way he sings songs such as Drive On and Redemption… it is the voice of a man who’s been to the bottom and fought his way back up. And well and truly made it. It’s not a broken man’s broken voice, but the powerful and commanding voice of a man who has been scarred and bruised time and time again, but never given up the ghost. And that’s the thing you need to pay attention to on this album: the voice. The guitar is there just to provide substance; it’s the voice that commands attention.

Picking out a few highlights from this CD, I recommend to try out the aforementioned Drive On and Redemption, and definitely Thirteen (written by none other than Glen “Devil’s Elvis” Danzig). Those are the highlights of the album, but none of the others are really much weaker. But this is not only musically a great album, it is also somehow a very encouraging and inspiring one… to think, that a man who started his career in the ‘50’s and had been through a rather long less successful period could come back, rise up to the surface, find a new audience and carve a new mark into the history of popular music. And all this without sacrifing one bit of his integrity! One can only respect a thing like that.