The hot young thing? At 71, John Leventhal has made a debut album
ABC News
No one will confuse musician John Leventhal with being the hot new thing
NEW YORK -- It's a little late for John Leventhal to be considered a hot young thing in music.
He's won six Grammy Awards for songwriting and producing records, the latter a role that he essentially fell into as a journeyman guitarist in New York who befriended artists like Shawn Colvin and Jim Lauderdale.
Besides them, Leventhal has produced music for Marc Cohn, Sarah Jarosz, Joan Osborne, William Bell, The Blind Boys of Alabama and his wife, Rosanne Cash. He's played guitar with the likes of Jackson Browne, Willie Nelson, Ry Cooder, Elvis Costello, Donald Fagen and The National.
Probably his biggest popular success was co-writing and producing Colvin's hit, “Sunny Came Home.”
Now, at age 71, he's releasing an album of his own music for the first time. “Rumble Strip” is out Friday on a new label of the same name he started with Cash. The eclectic mix of mostly instrumental, roots-oriented music includes songs co-written with Cash, Cohn and The National's Matt Berninger. Doubts about his own voice led him to record only three vocal tracks, two of them duets with his wife. On his sole solo vocal, “The Only Ghost,” a songwriting collaboration with Cohn, Leventhal is an aging guitar-slinger who tells a listener that he probably played “your local dive” at some point.
