Hi. My name’s Josh Haden. I’m probably best known for writing a song entitled “Spiritual” that was recorded by Johnny Cash on his 1996 Grammy-winning album Unchained. I founded a band called Spain in the early 1990s that has recorded seven studio albums and is currently working on our eighth. I’m the son of the late jazz bassist Charlie Haden. My sisters, Rachel, Petra, and Tanya, have an acclaimed singing group called the Haden Triplets, and are accomplished solo artists in their own rights. My brother-in-law is the musician and actor Jack Black. I’m married and have a teenaged son, and live in the suburbs of Los Angeles.
When my father’s second wife, Ruth, died last year, she left me my father’s entire archive. The amount of material is massive. It fills half of my garage and a large offsite storage space. Charlie and Ruth kept everything. Thousands of LPs and CDs. Master tapes and hard drives filled with original multi-track recordings. Boxes of bootleg tapes collected over decades. Tens of thousands of pages of handwritten notes, letters, business-related paperwork, receipts, and medical records. Hundreds of pages of original sheet music. Hundreds of Christmas cards. A hundred years of photographs. Every magazine and newspaper article that mentioned my father’s name. Dozens of awards and plaques. Boxes of festival programs and t-shirts. Microphones and other electronic equipment. Very little of it organized, and many times haphazardly thrown into boxes seemingly at random.
Over thirty years ago I started writing a novel. Through time it took other shapes, but for different reasons both real and imagined, I’ve never been able to finish it. Shortly after my father’s death in 2014 I began adapting the material into a book of remembrances, a memoir. Or better yet, Mémoire, a French word that has no English translation. A literary collage of memories, diary entries beginning from the age of 7, dream journals, unpublished fiction and poetry, photographs, and, with the acquisition of my father’s estate, not just the material but observations based on the process of organizing the material itself. It’s a story of art, music, improvisation, joy, and life, but it’s also a story of addiction, abuse, untreated emotional trauma, and death. It’s the story of a father overcoming adversity to make a real contribution to American and world culture. It’s the story of coming to terms with a father’s shortcomings, throwing away the yolk of presumed self-failure and self-doubt, blame, and anger, trying to become a better father and person, and finding a sense of freedom.
I don’t have a publisher, nor have I submitted any material to a publisher. My plan is to use this Substack to write my book, whatever it turns out to become. Paid subscribers will be able to watch and interact with the process, from disparate notes and unfinished paragraphs to (hopefully) a finished, physical book. I’ll be posting every week, text, audio, and video. I also plan on producing a weekly podcast, posted every Friday, hosted by Substack, in which I present different albums from my father’s collection.
If you’ve read this far, thank you, and I hope you can join me.
I play bass, guitar, and sing in a band called Spain.
I’ve performed and/or recorded with Sun Kil Moon, Soulsavers, Donovan, Blue Man Group, Handsome Boy Modeling School, Esbjörn Svensson Trio, and Charlie Haden Family & Friends.
My songs have been performed and/or recorded by Johnny Cash, Soulsavers with Mark Lanegan, Charlie Haden Family & Friends, Charlie Haden & Pat Metheny, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and many others, and have appeared in many films, TV shows, and podcasts, most recently Bouli Lanners’ Nobody Has To Know, and Wim Wenders' The End Of Violence, Six Feet Under, and This American Life.
Charlie Haden is my father. If you’d like to learn more about his life and legacy start here and then go here.
