cash could not place the sentence, but he did not forget it. he said it haunted him for years. when he searched for its source, he found related images in the book of job: the roots of the wicked, the whirlwind, and the tree.
i realized that "the thorn tree in a whirlwind" was from the book of job. from there it grew into a song.
cash completed “the man comes around” for the 2002 album of the same name. the song builds an apocalypse from revelation and uses his cracked late voice. he considered it his best late work and said he put more into it than any song he had written in years. the dream’s whirlwind line remains in the lyric almost unchanged.
cash recorded the origin in the album’s liner notes. the dream did not give him a complete song. it gave him one sentence that stayed useful for years. he kept returning to it until he found the work it could support.