John Carter Cash's "Pineapple John" album out now

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John Carter Cash Honors History With Jamaica, Love for the Ocean, and a Seafaring Songwriter on New Album ‘Pineapple John’
By

Tina Benitez-Eves

Updated:

October 28, 2025 4:32 pm

When John Carter Cash was 3, he was given a plaque naming him “Colonel” of the state of Tennessee. “It was like ‘Let’s give Johnny’s [Johnny Cash’s] boy a plague,’” laughs Carter Cash of the unexpected honor. Cash’s friends, who knew of his early commemoration, later nicknamed him “Colonel Pineapple” and “Pineapple John.” The name stuck around and reemerged decades later when Carter Cash started writing “Pineapple John.”

From the song came the character, an entire storyline, and Carter Cash’s latest album, Pineapple John, centered around a singer-songwriter from Nashville who had one or two hits before hitting rock bottom and sailing out to sea. Produced by Carter Cash and Trey Call, Pineapple John is a personal album, documenting his love of the ocean and many years spent in Jamaica, once a second home for his parents, Johnny Cash and June Carter.

“I have a very personal relationship with the ocean,” says Carter Cash. “I’ve always spent a lot of time on the ocean. When I was young, I grew up part of the time in Jamaica. My parents had a house there, and then I lived part of the time in Florida in my 20s. I have a boat and go out a lot, and my ancestors on my dad’s side were seafarers.”

The album is also a “reflection of life’s struggles and triumphs,” says Carter Cash, whose conceptual songs chronicle the life of his seagoing character, from the opening acoustic spoken word prelude “Nekid Man” about a mostly naked man who sits and watches beneath the banyan tree, and the title track, which Carter Cash co-wrote with his son Jack Ezra Cash, one of several collaborators featured on the album, including Damon Fielder, Jon Vaughn, Dave Daeger, Caleb Caudle, Bill Miller, and Thomas Gabriel.

“In my mind, this character took off for the Gulf Coast or Jamaica and had been searching in different places,” says Carter Cash. Keeping with its nautical theme, the second father-and-son co-write, “Sleeping with the Mermaids,” is a two-minute, 23-second calypso fantasy about a drunken night of tequila, whiskey, and rum, and waking up with a mermaid.



The folkier “Uncle Ben The Devil and The Deep Blue Sea” is a song Carter Cash wrote during his 20s that found its way into the Pineapple John saga more than 30 years later. More sentimental sea shanties fill the 15-track album with “The Ballad of Spider John” and “The Hole in the Bottom of the Sea,” an ode to all the pirates, sailors, and other mariners who lost their lives at sea. It’s another song he started writing more than three decades earlier and features Australian singer and actress Clare Bowen, who reappears later on “The Island Fair,” on backing vocals.

There’s a more spiritual folk story of the days of reckoning and when God fits in on “Man Will Pray,” a song inspired by Carter Cash’s father. “That song means a lot to me,” shares Carter Cash, whose son Joseph John plays Moog on the track. “I wrote that in my father’s honor. It’s a psychedelic sermon right in the midst of the album.”

The entire story is also a culmination of the past 10 years of Cash’s life and songs, he says, and follows his 2018 album We Must Believe In Magic. “This album is probably my most cohesive,” says Carter Cash. “It’s not me just saying, ‘I’m going to do this genre and now, this one,’ even though there are multiple genres on here. It’s just as much calypso as it is Americana, but it still tells a story.”

More lighter moments arrive on”Soon Come” and the reggae-drenched “Shame and Scandal,” a song originally released by Trini López in 1960. “Jamaica Farewell” is the second cover on the album. Written by Irving Burgie and released by Harry Belafonte in 1956, it’s a continuation of Pineapple John‘s journey, leaving a girl behind in Kingston, and going on his way. Carter Cash’s piano serenade, “Snow on the Sand,” gives another glimpse into the protagonist’s tribulations at sea, featuring wife Ana Cristina Cash and Caitlin Evanson on backing vocals, and continues the family affair on the tender “Beckoning Melody,” co-written and sung with daughter Annabelle Cash.

Pineapple John concludes with a gospel-y reprise of “Man Will Pray” before the sentimental “Ocean Calling,” and what appears to be the character’s treacherous end at sea—So, take a drink as the brave ship sinks / On up the mast up the crow’s nest to watch the sunrise / And the last thing you see / As you sink to the deep / Are her sea blue eyes staring back at you.

By the end of his journey, there’s a final toast to the voyager in the three-part (and seven-minute-long) “The Island’s Fair/Captain Jim’s Drunken Dream/Carry On,” featuring Marty Stuart in the beginning part, playing a Gibson Les Paul for the first time in his life.

“It’s a whole story,” says Carter Cash. “A lot of it is his interior journey. I can’t help but feel like, at the end of the album, when the rounds are going and everybody’s singing along, that he’s probably on a raft, floating away, chasing a mermaid out into the ocean, going out into the sunset, and disappearing forever.”

There are more stories Carter Cahs hopes to tell. Nowadays, if he’s having fun on a project, he’ll keep working on it. It’s one of the things “Cowboy” Jack Clement, his father’s longtime producer and family friend, once advised. “I still keep the rules that he wrote on the studio wall,” Carter Cash says. “And dad always said to follow your heart and do what you believe and don’t do something for the sake of anything but love, and those are things I carry with me every day and try to live by.”

He adds, “I learned a lot about persistence from my dad.”