When the Billboard 200 welcomed a 2002 report that was drastically anticipated as the following in an acclaimed sequence, nobody knew fairly what significance it could assume lower than a yr later. American IV: The Man Comes Round was launched on November 5 that yr, and have become the final Johnny Money album launched earlier than his dying.
Produced just like the 1994, 1996 and 2000 albums within the American Recording sequence by Rick Rubin, the brand new set continued their theme of mixing re-recorded Money songs (and the forceful new title monitor) with conventional materials and a few strikingly adventurous covers. “The Man Comes Around” itself was described by Pitchfork as “an epic tale of apocalypse, interpreting Revelations with uplifting exuberance.” Q added that “Cash’s first composition for years [is] among the best he’s ever written.”
Of the brand new batch, one stood out as a daring and deeply private studying, particularly mixed with Mark Romanek’s painfully trustworthy, award-winning video. That, after all, was the Man In Black’s remake of 9 Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” which grew to become maybe the final nice recording of his life, and which has resonated much more since he handed away on the age of 71 in September 2003.
The Man Comes Round additionally had Money remaking pop ballad requirements comparable to Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and The Beatles’ ‘In My Life’; everybody else from Sting and the Eagles to Hank Williams; and even the time-honored “Danny Boy,” which was already greater than 100 years outdated by then. Not content material with one startling fashionable rock remake, Money additionally tackled Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus.”
A stellar listing of contributors to the album included Don Henley, Billy Preston, Fiona Apple and Nick Cave. The Austin Chronicle wrote: “Considering his deteriorating health, it’s amazing Johnny Cash is even able to record these days, which may ultimately explain the elegant, austere beauty of The Man Comes Around.”
The album debuted on the Billboard 200 at No. 70 (itself his finest displaying on that survey since The Man In Black, in 1971), and climbed as excessive as No.22. That was simply the most effective efficiency up to now by any of the American albums, but it surely was not till after Money’s dying that the fifth report within the run, American V; A Hundred Highways, grew to become his first No.1 pop album since 1969’s Johnny Money At San Quentin.
Talking to Self-importance Honest in regards to the American sequence in 2004, Rick Rubin mentioned: “I thought of the image of the Man in Black. [That] was a big part of who he was in real life, as well as a mythical image associated with him. I would always try to find songs that were suited for that.”
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