Johnny Cash - American V: A Hundred Highways

The sound of a lonely man; a man close to the end; a man with a lifetime of experience and not enough time in which to share it. And nobody, for that matter, to share it with. Except us.
Completed posthumously by producer Rick Rubin, Cash's last gasp is an object of beauty. It can be a painful listen, an emotional experience. But isn't the best music that? If You Could Read My Mind is the first track to induce tears and, after that, you're left, via I Came To Believe and A Legend In My Time, to reach for the hankies at every opportunity. Cash circa his prison gigs was an acquired taste but, in his latter years, his work sang out to everyone. A Hundred Highways is a fitting, if bittersweet, gorgeous finale.