“The blood that runs on cypress trees/cannot be washed away,” Cash sings over a sparse arrangement provided by her musical partner and husband John Leventhal. “By mothers’ tears and gasoline/and secrets un-betrayed.”

“A few years of my own personal reckoning with painful issues of race, racism, privilege, reconciliation, and individual responsibility led up to the moment in the summer of 2020, when finally no one could avert their eyes from the truth of white privilege in America, and the damage and sorrow caused by systemic racism,” Cash said of her new song. “I wrote ‘The Killing Fields’ in that summer.”

Rosanne Cash's New Song 'The Killing Fields' Addresses a Dark Moment in American History