Album dossier / 1981

Seven Year Ache

Rosanne Cash · Country/Country Rock

Rosanne Cash wrote the title track as a poem after a fight with then-husband and producer Rodney Crowell at a Ventura Boulevard restaurant; it took her roughly six months to finish and became the thematic spine of an album built around lovers fighting, breaking up and reconciling. Recorded in North Hollywood (mostly at Davlen and Magnolia studios) with a Los Angeles country-rock crew including Albert Lee, Emmylou Harris, Vince Gill and Booker T. Jones, the record's 'California country' sound was a deliberate break from straight Nashville production. Mastered days after John Lennon's murder, Cash had the engineer scratch 'Goodbye, John' into the vinyl runout groove of the first 25,000 pressings as a tribute. 'Seven Year Ache' topped the Billboard Country chart and crossed over to #22 Pop, making Cash (age 24) a star in her own right beyond her father Johnny Cash's shadow.