Rosanne Cash came down from Manhattan to teach a thing or two to the students at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy in Philadelphia on Wednesday. I interviewed her before class, and watched her talk to, sing to and teach about 40 kids in the school's sunlight-flooded recital hall, and after that Cash read from her 2010 memoir Composed in front of an assembly of about 500 students, teachers and parents. It made for a lovely morning.
Cash talked about how she would make a study of a Bob Dylan lyric as she was teaching herself how to write songs, and how she agrees with Mike Doughty that Twitter is "like bootcamp for songwriters": "You gotta say it in 140 characters and make it good. You can practice honing your skills that way."
She said that her goal in speaking to the SCH kids was to encourage "honorable subversion," and speaking of her 2009 album The List, she said "I found it a little unsettling that an album of covers was my most popular record in a long time." To wit, she's at work on an album of original songs on Southern themes, which she hopes to get out this year. And she says that while she still does get headaches from the rare Chiari Malformation condition that took 10 years to correctly diagnose before she had brain surgery in 2007, she's doing much better these days.
Read the story, which is in today's Inquirer, here, and watch Tom Gralish's video of Cash interacting with students and singing "Seven Year Ache" below.
Previously: Thom Lessner's animated video for The Darkness Follow In The Mix on Twitter here
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