“Runaway Train”
Rosanne Cash
Written by John Stewart
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
November 12, 1988
Rosanne Cash made history with “Runaway Train” when it became the fourth No. 1 single from King’s Record Shop to top the Billboard country singles chart.
This was the first album by a woman to produce that many chart toppers, and it wouldn’t be repeated until Shania Twain’s The Woman in Me several years later.
Rosanne Cash cried when she first heard the demo, recorded by Mary Chapin Carpenter, and was ready to cut it. But producer Rodney Crowell felt the song needed a bridge. Once the songwriter added one, Cash crafted it into one of her most sophisticated, clever, and infectious radio hits.
Because it was so heavily influenced by Carpenter’s take on the track, it serves as something of a bridge itself between the most significant female singer-songwriter of the eighties and the most significant one of the nineties. It’s hard to believe, as this is the fifth of six consecutive No. 1 singles for Cash, but she’s gearing up to leave the country music industry behind. We’ll see her one last time in 1989.
“Runaway Train” gets an A.
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Just to add something here:
The writer of “Runaway Train”, John Stewart, was a folk/rock singer/songwriter known for his 1979 smash “Gold”, and whose career dated all the way back to the folk music “scare” of the early 1960’s. He had replaced Dave Guard in The Kingston Trio in 1961, appearing on the group’s classic 1962 recording of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?”
He also wrote the wonderful “Daydream Believer” – most famously recorded by The Monkees but I love Anne Murray’s version.
This one is one of my favourite Rosanne Cash songs but I love everything of hers, honestly.
This just edges I Don’t Know Why You Don’t Want Me as my favorite Rosanne single. In retrospect, it’s kind of amazing that someone as forward thinking as Cash was so successful amid the Urban Cowboy era then through the New Traditionalist revival that was occurring during the mid-to-late eighties. Either way, another amazing record from one of the genre’s all-timers.
This is easily one of my favorites from Rosanne Cash. While I’ll always be a complete fool for “Seven Year Ache” this is easily #2 from her hit making days. I definitely think had she continue to stay with commercial country (she was very progressive) I think she could’ve had hits up till 95.
If there was any album that deserved to be the first by a female artist to score four #1’s, it was “King’s Record Shop”. It’s hard to believe that “peak Rosanne Cash” was simultaneously almost the end in terms of radio hits. If she had stayed the course, she could have been on the podium for the greatest era for women in country a few years ahead. The reminder that Mary Chapin Carpenter sang the demo for this song was an excellent would-be foreshadowing of how much mischief the two of them could have made if they’d collaborated. But alas, Rosanne was right to follow her heart if it was pointing her in a different direction, and she still made plenty of outstanding music in the decades to come even if it wasn’t for commercial country radio.
As for “Runaway Train”, it’s one of my favorites of hers which is saying a lot given how many classics are in her catalog. It’s distinctive and instantly recognizable from the opening beat, a very clever spin on the country music “train song” as a metaphor for a relationship on the brink of dramatic ruin. The record was stimulated by a contemporary production and an escalating mix of instruments that sold the intensity of an approaching train bearing down on the narrator, and by proxy the listener. Even as a kid listening to the song, I felt the musical equivalent of being tied to the railroad tracks for 3 1/2 minutes when this song played. I’ve given two extra-credit perfect scores in my reviews thus far from 1987 and 1988, both to Rosanne Cash.
Grade: A+