Rosanne Cash: Once your kids get older and get out of the house, it's...

Celtic music is part of the language in Scotland and Ireland, where every kid and grandparent knows those songs, music by the likes of Woody Guthrie and Hank Snow is getting entrenched here. They are part of our cultural language. It's part of a living treasure. It doesn't just belong to a museum.

Rosanne Cash

song museums kids

War is idiocy. We live on a small, small planet, and what we do to others is what we do to ourselves

Rosanne Cash

idiocy planets war

We are creating a culture where content creators are a new servant class, and paid as such.

Rosanne Cash

creating class culture

I found it was really impossible for me to write songs when I couldn't sing.

Rosanne Cash

impossible writing song

I'm a songwriter. My voice just serves what I'm writing about. So to let all that go, I mean, bring the sensibilities of it actually to the song choices, but to just be the interpreter was incredibly liberating and really fun.

Rosanne Cash

writing song fun

The new record started out being about loss, but it's morphed into being about how relationships go on even though one person is not in a body anymore.

Rosanne Cash

records goes-on loss

My record label is treating me like I'm a new artist, which is exciting after all this time.

Rosanne Cash

records labels artist

I gave up language for a while, and I started painting.And then I only listened to Miles Davis and other instrumental music to see how it felt to be without words.

Rosanne Cash

instrumental-music painting language

Sarah Palin is a great example of someone that just stirs the pot for the sake of the attention. No vision, no critical thinking, no backup to her statements. Just to incite little riots everywhere and capitalize upon it financially. To me, she is a microcosm of the ultimate cynicism in American politics.

Rosanne Cash

vision littles thinking

As John Adams said, all democracies will eventually self-destruct. We seem to be doing it very quickly.

Rosanne Cash

democracy self said

If you're playing in a tradition and you have no reference point to it, no understanding and have not studied it, I can't respect that.

Rosanne Cash

tradition understanding ifs

I wanted to be the writer in the room setting depth charges of feeling out the world with my language.You know, I had a very romantic idea about that.But I grew into being a performer.

Rosanne Cash

depth feelings ideas

"Country" has become a marketing term. I see myself as a songwriter.

Rosanne Cash

marketing term country

While visiting places in the South with my heart really open, I realized how important people in certain geographical spots were to me, what they symbolize, how I'm still connected to them and how much they are a part of my ancestry, both musical and real.

Rosanne Cash

real heart people

Isn't that the goal, as you grow older? That you start reclaiming those parts of yourself you didn't recognize or didn't think were there all along? That's what happened when I made The River and the Thread record.

Rosanne Cash

goal rivers thinking

Southern gentility is evocative to me.

Rosanne Cash

gentility southern

I was a songwriter; that was the torch I carried. This is an honorable profession. This is what I do.

Rosanne Cash

profession honorable torches

My dad and I had a real meeting of the minds. We loved to talk about music, politics, and art. He loved children. The thing I missed most about my dad when he died was that this person who really gets who I am at the core was gone.

Rosanne Cash

dad children art

Being in Vietnam changed him [Johnny Cash] fundamentally. He was devastated when we went into Iraq.

Rosanne Cash

vietnam cash iraq

He [Johnny Cash] was so fragile. We invaded Iraq in March, and he died in September. And because his health was so fragile, he couldn't take the controversy of making a public statement against the war. He knew that people were rabid. They attacked me mercilessly after I did the press conference with Musicians United to Win Without War. He knew that he couldn't tolerate that.

Rosanne Cash

iraq winning war

Once your kids get older and get out of the house, it's not like it stops. They're on the phone with me every day; I'm intimately involved in their problems.