Johnny Cash: American III: Solitary Man

ONE OF THE bullet-point discussions of this album – on which the mythopoeic Man in Black does the Rick Rubin thang a third time, thus completing a neat trilogy with American Recordings and Unchained – might be how it takes a John R. Cash to bring a Will ‘Palace’ Oldham into the orbit of L.A. luminaries like Tom Petty and Sheryl Crow; or, for that matter, to bring Oldham’s chilling ‘I See A Darkness’ into the same frame as Petty’s ‘I Won’t Back Down’ and U2’s ‘One’.