Johnny Cash: The Man Comes Around (American Recordings)

WEIGHTED DOWN by the difficult circumstances behind its recording – illness, hospitalisations, two bouts of pneumonia this past year alone, speculation that the increasingly fragile Cash would be over and done with before the album was – the subject-matter of the songs on The Man Comes Around looks almost too macabre. Exploitative even. In the hands of anyone other than Rick Rubin, it might well have proved so.