Carlene Carter Celebrates Survival
She Is Stronger in a Personal and Musical Return

This is why you should care about Carlene Carter: She puts her whole life into her music in a way few artists dare or accomplish. Not just snippets of a diary. I mean her life experience, her guts and her whole psyche. It goes in there. It's not always a pretty recipe. But the results are often gems of music.

Her work continues to illuminate the peculiar strength -- and the weakness -- of the whole Cash-Carter legacy, which is a musical edifice that is going to endure for a long, long time. And Carter's latest album, Stronger, coming some 13 years since her last studio effort, amply demonstrates that. It reflects the toll taken on her by wrong roads taken and unavoidable tragedies. In Carlene's case, she's had career triumphs and backslides, three marriages and numerous personal losses.

A her stepfather Johnny Cash once famously said, "Drugs run through this family like crap through a goose." And Carlene was no exception. She experienced a harrowing heroin bust when she took the fall for her late amour, Howie Epstein of Tom Petty's Heartbreakers, and she's had her own years of heroin addiction and alcohol abuse. Fortunately for her, she came out of it all with tales to tell of falling and getting back up again.

Me-centered music lives and dies by the strength of its compositions. Strong songs celebrate the worth of their creator. Lesser works invite attack, ridicule or -- worse -- no attention at all. From the Carter Family on to Johnny Cash, June Carter Cash, Rosanne Cash, Carlene Carter and others, they have risen and fallen on the strengths and frailties of their own labors.

- Chet Flippo, CMT.com Editorial Director

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