(from http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/legal-and-management/5820021/lost-johnny-cash-album-out-next-spring)
There's new never-before-heard music coming from Johnny Cash. Cash's estate is releasing "Out Among the Stars," an album he recorded with Billy Sherrill in the early 1980s that was never released by Columbia Records, then disappeared when the company dropped Cash in 1986. Turns out Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash, stashed the tapes - along with just about everything else that came into their possession. . .
. . . Columbia paired him with Sherrill, a producer and Country Music Hall of Fame member who was then the president of CBS Records Nashville. One of the main architects of country music's so-called countrypolitan sound, Sherrill helped push the genre toward pop sounds and conventions - and away from Cash's more independent-minded ways.
The pairing came at a time when Cash was at a low ebb in his popularity. The music on "Out Among the Stars" is taken from 1981 and `84 sessions, at a time when country music was going through great change.
It was clear record company executives didn't think much of the outcome. They put out a few more Cash albums after the recordings were made, but never used the music from those sessions before dropping him. Sherrill backed Cash with a band that consisted of fellow Country Hall of Fame member Hargus "Pig" Robbins and a young friend of Cash's named Marty Stuart. . .
. . . [It] was recorded during some of the most difficult years of Cash's life. He felt like he'd lost his legacy and he was still dealing with the fallout from personal problems including infidelity and drug addiction.
He soon met producer Rick Rubin, though, and wrote a coda to his career that gave his life something of a mythic quality.
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