LOS ANGELES — When asked for the story behind this week’s posthumous release of Johnny Cash’s “Out Among the Stars,” a “lost” album recorded in the early ’80s with fabled Nashville producer Billy Sherrill, his son, John Carter Cash, quickly reels off a laundry list of reasons.
“It seemed to be a cohesive body of work,” Cash, 44, said from the family’s headquarters in Hendersonville, Tenn. A few years ago, he came across the never-released recordings while organizing the bounty of archival materials left behind by his father and his mother, June Carter Cash, after their deaths in 2003.
“Working with (project co-producer) Steve Berkowitz,” he said, “it struck us as a unique and beautiful Johnny Cash record.”
But more than that, “Out Among the Stars” is a strongly personal project for John Carter Cash, the only child of Johnny and June.
“When these tapes were rediscovered and I heard them again, I was reminded of this man who was my friend,” said Cash, who was 14 when most of the album’s songs were recorded in 1984. “He and I were very close in the 1980s. So it’s a really personal connection for me to hear this.”
The album includes two duets between Johnny and June, including “Baby Ride Easy,” a song that Carlene Carter — June’s daughter from her first marriage to country star Carl Smith — introduced to her mother and stepfather. (Carlene Carter also makes a present-day guest appearance on the recently completed track.)
There’s also a pairing of Cash and longtime pal Waylon Jennings on Hank Snow’s classic “I’m Movin’ On” and “She Used to Love Me a Lot,” a dark ballad of lost love that also appears in a haunting bonus track produced by Elvis Costello, who befriended Cash in the late 1970s.
Many longtime Cash fans are likely to find the album’s highlight to be “I Came to Believe,” one of two Cash originals. The song taps aspects of the recovery process that Cash experienced upon entering the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs, Calif., after becoming addicted to pain medication.
