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Jovial, randy and anything but dark: Johnny Cash’s surprise return single Well Alright reviewed

Rescued from Cash’s low ebb in the early 1990s, this fun, lightweight song is a long way from the moody recordings with Rick Rubin he soon turned towards

Quite what these demos sounded like before their original instrumentation was stripped away and replaced with new arrangements in a classic Cash style is a matter of conjecture (the press release tactfully notes they “left something to be desired as [they] placed the songs into a particular time”, which seems to imply they might have featured the same booming stadium-sized sound and occasional ill-fitting washes of synths that bedevilled his Mercury albums) but the first single, Well Alright, comes from a different world to the flinty, austere music that would reinvigorate Cash’s career a year after it was recorded. A jovial tale of a hook-up in a launderette that ultimately leads to marriage, filled with winking lines – “I opened up the dryer and I set it on soft and light / She said ‘be careful with my silk and lace’ and I said ‘well, alright’” – it arrives decorated with twanging reverb-heavy electric guitar, upright bass and Cash’s preferred boom-chicka-boom rhythm. It’s good enough to make you believe that Cash’s 1993 demos don’t deserve to languish in obscurity, without ever suggesting his career would have blossomed again in the way it did without Rick Rubin’s vision: had it been released shortly after it was recorded, it would doubtless have met the same fate as the singles taken from 1991’s The Mystery of Life.

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