[7] The album's title track, "Out Among the Stars", was released as the fourth and final single, with its lyric video premiering on May 7, 2014.

[13] Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic wrote that Billy Sherrill "winds up simply sweetening Johnny without changing his core sound".

[10] Rob Tannembaum's review in Rolling Stone mentions Cash's fading star power in the early 1980s amidst the "Urban Cowboy fad".

Tannembaum continued: "You might expect Out Among the Stars – a set of unreleased songs he cut with Sherrill in 1981 and 1984 – to be a contract-fulfilling sleepwalk.

(Cash put out several mostly mediocre LPs in those years, but left this material unfinished; it was discovered after his death.)

Instead, it proves that even at his most uninterested, Cash couldn't help but make a record with weight, moral complexity, and grim humor.