Until recently it’d been quite a while since I sent out a dispatch on this channel. But we’re not here to talk about doubt and stagnation right now. We’re here to talk about New Order’s “Regret.”

Then again, you don’t need me to tell you how great “Regret” is. Lusciousness simply seeps from its pores, drips off of it. From its self-consciously overdramatic canned-strings-and-ascending-guitar opening, through the nuke-u-ler bass burst from which its nigh unvarying tambourine-funk dance beat mushrooms, to the sap-sweet coda incinerated in another such burst, it pulses and pushes your body to move, while a particularly affecting vocal performance form Barney Sumner, desolate and hopeful at the same time, dares your heart not to move.

The guitar is slippery and silver. The synths are a comforting, pillowy grey. The drums are mixed low but in the red. And the bass is deep blue-wounded and seeking, one of the best amongst Peter Hook’s classic lessons in how-you’re-not-supposed-to-play-bass-fiddle.

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So Johnny Cash is dead. Maybe it says something about the relative comfort and lack of drama in my life that this simple fact made me sadder than I’d been for quite a while, maybe a year or so.

But O how pitiful, how paltry, the “C” section of my wall-to-wall CD consumer boast display case. Three goddamn discs by Cash—Live at Folsom, The Sun Years and a budget best-of. I should’ve been a better fan to him. What’s three records in the face of, what, five decades as the giant of a genre, and (its clear descent from the keening of the Celts aside) a very American genre at that? I’ll cop straight off to being underqualified to tackle the task of discussing Cash’s life and work. But that’s never stopped me before, especially when:

Johnny Cash affected my life, or my view of it. From the superficial—hey, I can wear all black without looking like a total pretentious dweeb (can’t I?)—to some deeper stuff.

About mortality. About how doing the right thing often doesn’t come naturally, and doing the wrong thing can be pretty badass, but at the end of the day we want some sort of—what?—redemption. And how in the face of all the bad man has done, that selfsame redemption can seem completely out of reach, a taunt. About the importance of looking oneself in the face, facing the mirror, even (especially) at the very pit of self-designed degradation. About the one good thing a man can do, can be, even when it’s all wrong. About honesty.

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