Years after Nick Lowe‘s divorce from Carlene Carter, Johnny Cash‘s stepdaughter, he remained close to the Carter-Cash family. Lowe was married to Carter, the daughter of June Carter and her first husband Carl Smith from 1979 through 1990—and she even appeared during their wedding in the video for Lowe’s hit “Cruel to Be Kind.”
In 1994, when Lowe released his album The Impossible Bird, which featured the woeful track “The Beast in Me.” In it, Lowe’s lyrics explore the inner beast or demons, people often carry around with them.
The beast in me is caged by frail and fragile bars
Restless by day and by night rants and rages at the stars
God help the beast in me
The beast in me has had to learn to live with pain
And how to shelter from the rain
And in the twinkling of an eye, might have to be restrained
God help the beast in me
Sometimes it tries to kid me
That it’s just a teddy bear
And even somehow manage to vanish in the air
And that is when I must beware of the beast in me
That everybody knows
They’ve seen him out dressed in my clothes
Patently unclear if it’s New York or New Year
God help the beast in me
But Lowe’s solemn ballad had a lengthy journey before it was ready.
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[RELATED: 5 Fascinating Facts About Nick Lowe]
“How’s’The Beast’?”
Initially, Lowe started working on “The Beast in Me” more than 12 years earlier and first played it for Cash in 1981, while he was in London to play at Wembley Stadium.
“I had this idea for a song, had the first verse, and I stayed up all night thinking, ‘Oh, I can play this for him,’” recalled Lowe in 2017. “I drank I don’t know how much, but a lot. I became convinced I was Johnny. It sounded good after a few bottles of wine. The next thing I knew I was waking up to Carlene talking on the phone, saying, ‘Yeah, we’re looking forward to seeing you, Nick’s written this great song. He stayed up all night and he really wants to play it with you.’ I opened my eyes to a hideous hangover. I definitely didn’t feel like Johnny Cash.”
Lowe tried to get Carter to call them back and tell them he had fallen ill, but it was too late. Cash and his entourage were already on the way to soundcheck. “I went into the garden to do some digging and get some air and suddenly this shadow came over me,” said Lowe. “It was John: ‘Carlene says you got this song.’ So I went into the house, the sitting room was full of people, his band and nannies, June, backing singers. They’d all come in from the tour bus which was parked outside. I scrabbled around for this terrible scrawl I’d written, and instead of the sonorous voice of the night before, out and came this weedy little voice.”
When Lowe finished, he remembered a silence had fell in the room before Cash said “Play it again.” Lowe said it was worse the second time. “When it finished I never wanted to hear this thing ever again, but before he went, John said, ‘Don’t worry about it, you’re onto something.’ Every time I saw him afterward he’d ask, ‘How’s ‘The Beast’?’” I thought he was taking the piss but he meant it.”
Royal Albert Hall
When Cash played the Royal Albert Hall in London in the early ’90s, he asked Lowe to join him on stage, and the performance prompted him to finally finish “The Beast.”
“I had really mixed feelings about this,” said Lowe. “On the one hand I was ever so pleased and proud that, even though me and Carlene weren’t together anymore, we were still friends. On the other hand, I was a Johnny Cash fan and I knew how I would feel if I’d gone to see him at the Albert Hall and some bloomin’ bloke who you could see for two bob down the road got up with him; get this guy off. I told him this, and he couldn’t believe it—laughed his head off—it sounded like distant thunder.”
He added, “Nonetheless, he [Cash] said, ‘It’s too late now, you’ve got to get up and do a couple of tunes.’ That was the last time. He also asked about ‘The Beast In Me,’ and for some reason something clicked and the thing just rolled out 12 years after he’d first heard it.”
The next thing Lowe knew, Cash was playing his song. “My step-daughter rang me up saying, ‘Grandpa can’t stop playing that song you wrote,’” said Lowe. “The next thing, it came out on ‘American Recordings.’”
‘American Recordings’
The third track on Johnny Cash’s album, American Recordings, released in April 1994, his was the first recorded release of “The Beast in Me,” before Lowe featured it on The Impossible Bird in November of ’94.
“I recorded it very basically, the version on ‘The Impossible Bird,’ and sent it to him,” said Lowe. “When he sent me a copy of ‘American Recordings’ I was absolutely thrilled. It really is a good song, and the fact that he dug it so much is something to be really proud of.”
American Recordings earned Cash a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album of the Year in 1994. Years after its release, the song played during the closing credits of the pilot episode of the TV drama The Sopranos. Lowe later released a live version of “The Beast in Me” on his 2004 album Untouched Takeaway.
In 2011, Mark Lanegan covered “The Beast in Me” for the The Hangover Part II: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, while the Vaccines later covered the song on their 2012 album Please Please Do Not Disturb. Lowe’s song is also part of the 2025 limited Netflix series The Beast in Me, starring Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys.
Photo: Michael Putland/Getty Images
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