Brandon Flowers, Father John Misty and Local Natives Cover Johnny Cash
In celebration of the long-delayed release of Johnny Cash‘s lost 1984 album, Out Among the Stars, French video series La Blogothèque recruited three acts – Killers frontman Brandon Flowers, Father John Misty and Local Natives – to record covers of a few of its 13 tracks in a California desert. “He was also one of the greatest storytellers, and that’s something that I gravitate toward, not just because of the music but because of how open he was about his faith,” Flowers said of the late country icon before leading off with his take on “I Came to Believe.”
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Up next, singer-songwriter Father John Misty gave a solo performance of duet “Baby Ride Easy” – “I’ve always loved the sense of humor between June and Johnny Cash,” he told the camera, “you can kind of hear them winking at each other” – before Local Natives closed the set by refiguring the record’s title track, “Out Among the Stars,” as something resembling a Postal Service outtake. “I don’t even think about it as country music,” the band’s Kelcey Ayer said. “I think about it as a person who is so passionate about doing exactly what he wants to do.”
Out this Tuesday, Out Among the Stars was recorded in the early Eighties but remained shelved for nearly three decades before Cash’s son, John Carter Cash, found it sitting in storage room in his father’s office. “We were like, my goodness, this is a beautiful record that nobody has ever heard,” John Carter Cash told the Associated Press last year about the record. “Johnny Cash is in the very prime of his voice for his lifetime. He’s pitch-perfect.”