"They say there's no place like home," Johnny Cash wistfully states in his introduction to "There's a Mother Always Waiting at Home." "When I was young, I didn't know there was any other place but home."
This statement encapsulates the feel of the
country-music legend's latest posthumous release, Personal File (Sony). A collection of 49 previously unreleased tracks on two discs, the album is unabashedly, unsettlingly intimate as if the listener had been transported directly into the Cash-family living room.
According to the record's accompanying material, the album brings together a series of private recordings made by Cash at his home studio mostly in 1973, with a few additions in 1982. Discovered in a private vault, the master tapes were kept in a box labeled simply, "Personal File," and never intended for release.
