Event details
Love Police and Boroondara Arts are pleased to present Cash: A Journey Through the American Recordings, starring Henry Wagons and the Tennessee Studs.
No country music icon has the depth, enigma and songwriting weight of Johnny Cash. And there’s nobody better suited to honour and revitalize this legacy than Australian outlaw country founding-figure and brooding baritone Henry Wagons.
Known as the ‘Man in Black’, Cash’s music has always embraced the existential void and stared down the darkness head-on. No period of his esteemed career did this more so than his infamous, late-career American Recordings albums recorded with creative guru Rick Rubin. Across the course of these 6 albums released between 1996 and 2006, Cash’s every syllable serves as both a show-down and an embrace of death itself. These American Recordings records were the instigators for Henry Wagons to pick up the guitar and serve as the embryo for an esteemed career playing his own brand of gothic country music over a quarter century.
Now, spanning space and time, these two Titans of twang, Cash and Wagons, perfectly intertwine in this new show honouring the songs, arrangements and stories behind these perfectly curated songs, in the grand surrounds of Hawthorn Arts Centre's Main Hall.
In Cash: A journey through the American Recordings Henry Wagons will lean into the deep mythology and sound of The American Recordings Albums. Featuring the favourites Solitary Man (Neil Diamond), I Hung My Head (Sting), The Mercy Seat (Nick Cave), Hurt (Nine Inch Nails), One (U2) and more, Wagons and his band The Tennessee Studs will re-create the sonic depth, poise and ominous force of the original recordings, as if you were sitting with Cash and Rubin in the control room.
Don't miss one of the only standalone 2025 Melbourne performances of Cash: A Journey Through the American Recordings!