At 70, Rosanne Cash knows that more of her life is behind her than ahead of her, and that knowledge is quietly reshaping how she works — less time on the road, more time writing.
“I’m hyper aware of the preciousness of every day and the relationships I have, and the work I do, and music,” she said during a recent phone interview. “It all seems more precious.”
That awareness will be on display Jan. 31, when Cash appears at Stissing Center in Pine Plains to open the nonprofit arts organization’s 2026 season.
Cash has been gradually scaling back her touring schedule. “My touring this year is going to be a lot less than last year, which was less than the year before,” she said. “I’m ramping down. It’s a young person’s game.”
She has lived in New York for 35 years, after earlier chapters in Memphis and Nashville, and her relationship with the Hudson Valley runs deep. She and her husband, the songwriter and producer John Leventhal, once kept a house in Chatham, just north of Hudson. Before that, Leventhal lived in Germantown. “So we spent quite a bit of time up there,” Cash said. “I absolutely love it.”
The attachment is creative as well as personal. She described the region as “incredibly mystical,” pointing to her admiration for the Hudson River School of painters and the network of friendships that has accumulated over time. “It feels like home a bit,” she said.
That sense of place has reshaped how Cash now thinks about performance. Her decision to play venues like Stissing Center, she said, is not about selectivity so much as necessity — about what small cultural spaces still make possible.
“The whole reason we’re playing at Stissing Center is because I think that those small-town art centers and rural venues are essential,” she said. “Particularly now, when the arts are defunded and politicized and there’s less access, there’s less money.” The stakes, she emphasized, are human rather than institutional.
“It’s absolutely essential for humanity, for human spirit, for our evolution as a species, for our healing, for connection, unity,” she said of the arts. “If peace comes to the planet, it’s not gonna be because some politician created a policy. It’s because people are united by our humanity — and one of the best ways to access that is through the arts, through music.”
Over a career spanning more than four decades, Cash has built a body of work marked by narrative clarity and moral weight, moving fluidly across country, folk, rock, and a distinctly literary strain of American songwriting. She has earned four Grammy Awards — three for her 2014 album “The River & The Thread” — along with 12 additional nominations. In 2021, she became the first woman to receive the Edward MacDowell Award for music composition, and she was recently elected an honorary American member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Her creative life has extended beyond music. Her 2010 memoir, “Composed,” offered a measured account of an American upbringing shaped by art, loss, and independence. Still, Cash speaks less about legacy than about focus — how much attention one can give, and where.
That attentiveness, she believes, is felt most strongly in smaller rooms. “The sense of connection with the audience is really more palpable when they’re closer,” she said. “You can see faces. It feels like a room that you’re in together.” The exchange, she added, is mutual. “The chemical reaction between audience and performer — it goes two ways.”
Her sensitivity to intimacy began early, as a listener. Asked about the first concert she attended not as a performer but as an audience member, Cash didn’t hesitate. “Well, my dad,” she said of her late father Johnny Cash. After that came Peter, Paul and Mary, whom she saw at a small outdoor venue in rural Southern California. “A tiny little amphitheater,” she recalled. “It made an imprint.”
Over time, she has attended shows “everywhere from bars to high school auditoriums to stadiums,” she said. But the smaller spaces have remained distinct. “The intimacy of those small theaters is really special.”
That intimacy carries new weight as Cash reconsiders how much of herself she wants to give to the road. “I don’t want to tour that much anymore,” she said. “It’s getting too exhausting, and I don’t want to spend that much time away from my home and my writing desk.”
The desk, she explained, is both literal and portable. “In my kitchen,” she said, laughing. “But really, my writing desk is everywhere. I was just at a hair salon going over some lyrics.”
Cash is nearly finished with a new album — her first since 2018 — though it does not yet have a title. It is expected to be released later this year. Asked what she is bringing into the work now, she paused. “Experience,” she said. “A sense of rootedness. Loss. Time. A carefulness with the beauty around me, because I can see how fragile it is.”
She will appear in Pine Plains alongside Leventhal, her longtime collaborator, whose spare guitar work and understated production have shaped much of her recent output. Together, they favor songs that unfold through detail rather than spectacle.
What Cash hopes audiences take from her performance at Stissing Center is not something she tries to prescribe. “It’s not like I help them to take away anything,” she said. “Whatever they came for.” She recalled advice from Bob Dylan that has stayed with her: “The audience doesn’t come to feel your feelings. They come to feel their own feelings.”
As she shifts her focus from the road to the pen, Cash seems less interested in leaving an impression than in being present — in the shared quiet of a room, the faces close enough to read, and the brief sensation that time, for a song or two, has slowed.
Rosanne Cash takes the stage at Stissing Center as part of its “Spark! Season Launch Event” scheduled for 7 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 31. Tickets range from $100 to $150 and are available online.