There's new never-before-heard music coming from Johnny Cash. Cash's estate is releasing Out Among the Stars, an album he recorded with Billy Sherrill in the early 1980s that was never released by Columbia Records, then disappeared when the company dropped Cash in 1986. Turns out Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash, stashed the tapes—along with just about everything else that came into their possession. "They never threw anything away," says their son, John Carter Cash. "They had an archive that had everything in it from the original audio tapes from The Johnny Cash Show to random things like a camel saddle, a gift from the prince of Saudi Arabia."
They stored away so much, in fact, the younger Cash and archivists at Legacy Recordings didn't find the material until last year, long after the family began issuing archival music by Cash. Multiple music, book, and restoration projects have been started in the past 18 months to mark what would have been the singer's 80th birthday and the 10th anniversary of his death. Out Among the Stars will be out March 25. "We were so excited when we discovered this," says his son. "We were like, my goodness this is a beautiful record that nobody has ever heard." (More Johnny Cash stories.)