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Rubin: Johnny Cash living room demos sounded better than studio band sessions

Rick Rubin · Rick Rubin on Finding Your Life’s Work · May 24, 2026 · at 48:52

Legendary record producer Rick Rubin reflects on producing Johnny Cash's acclaimed 1994 comeback album 'American Recordings.'

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“The most interesting version of this to me is when he's singing alone, which is really the demos in my living room, him singing me songs. That sounded better than when we went into the recording studio with musicians and played them with the band.”

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