Rosanne Cash - Seven Years Ache (1981)

Artist:  Rosanne Cash
Title:  Seven Year Ache
Release:  1981
Format:  LP
Label:  Ariola Records
Catalog#  203469

“Seven Year Ache” is the third studio album by American country music singer Rosanne Cash. It was produced by her then-husband Rodney Crowell and reached number one on the Billboard country album chart. Three of its tracks were also number one in the U.S. country singles category: “Seven Year Ache” (which also crossed over to the U.S. pop top forty), “My Baby Thinks He’s a Train” and “Blue Moon with Heartache”.
The bottom line is that Rosanne Cash’s masterpiece “Seven Year Ache” paved the way for Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Shawn Colvin, and then some. Proclaimed by Cash and her husband/producer/collaborator, Rodney Crowell, as “punktry,” the album adds an entirely new twist on the Nashville sound.
 Utilizing everything from synthesizers and rock arrangements to pop ballad-styled charts and plenty of attitude, Seven Year Ache yielded three number one singles and songs by rock musicians such as Tom Petty and singer/songwriters like Keith Sykes and Steve Forbert. Of the singles, Cash penned two; the title track, which is a sorrowful indictment of her husband’s philandering ways, and the shattering ballad “Blue Moon With Heartache.” The third, the smash “My Baby Thinks He’s a Train,” was written by Asleep at the Wheel’s Leroy Preston. Musically, the band included many of the same players from the Right or Wrong sessions, with the emerging vocal talent of former Pure Prairie League member Vince Gill. Forbert’s “What Kinda Girl” is almost rockabilly in its shuffling intensity and punk bravado. It dares the listener to define the protagonist just to shatter the preconception. There’s also a nod to tradition here in Cash’s beautifully updated read of the Merle Haggard/Red Simpson nugget “You Don’t Have Very Far to Go,” complete with whinnying pedal steels and a honky tonk backbeat. In “My Baby Thinks He’s a Train,” Cash and Crowell very consciously offer a new generation interpretation of dad Johnny’s sound. This rocks harder yet is smooth as silk and full of that desolate want Johnny offered in his delivery. But unlike her father’s, this isn’t a forlorn yearning want, it’s a pissed off anthemic want. For the ambulance chasers, this record with its songs of infidelity and broken promises may indeed be the first crack in a marriage and collaboration that ended a decade later. The tempo borrows the old Tennessee Three rhythm, but sped up into the stratosphere, with a shifting Western swing line near the refrain.


Side one
1.  Rainin’  (2:54)
2.  Seven Year Ache  (3:15)
3.  Blue Moon With Heartache  (4:28)
4.  What Kinda Girl?  (2:47)
5.  You Don’t Have Very Far To Go  (2:35)

Side two
1.  My Baby Thinks He’s A Train  (3:13)
2.  Only Human  (4:00)
3.  Where Will The Words Come From?  (2:45)
4.  Hometown Blues  (2:58)
5.  I Can’t Resist (3:25)

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