The voice is what you notice first, and it is barely holding. Johnny Cash turned 70 the year this record came out. The American IV sessions are fitted between hospital stays, and you can hear where he has been in every short breath. Rick Rubin produces. Smokey Hormel and Benmont Tench play. Nobody tries to make him sound younger than he is.
The song is not his. Trent Reznor wrote it for Nine Inch Nails, and it first appeared on The Downward Spiral in 1994. Reznor’s version carries a backstory of its own. On paper the match makes no sense: a Country Music Hall of Fame member, born in Kingsland, Arkansas, in 1932, taking on a song from a man who made his name in a very different room. What Cash first made of it is its own small story, and it doesn’t go the way you’d guess.
Another man's song, sung like a farewell.
Because the easy assumption is that he went looking for it. Everything in the take points that way. He sings it like something he has carried for years and finally set down. He keeps Reznor’s lyric almost word for word. Almost. The phrasing is his, the patience is his, and by the last chorus the ownership feels settled.
Then there’s the video. Mark Romanek directs it, and it airs early in 2003 on VH1 and MTV2. It does not flatter him. The camera moves between his lakeside home in Hendersonville, Tennessee, and rooms that hold the old life, and it lets the present and the past sit side by side without comment. It looks like a decision, a farewell somebody set out to make. Watch it with that in mind, then find out how it came to look that way.
Somewhere in all this, the man who wrote the song had to sit down and watch it like everyone else. What he made of that has not stayed fixed.
June Carter Cash died in Nashville in May 2003. Cash died there in September, at 71. He recorded this as a man with some time left. Hear it now knowing how little there was.
Surface any pearl, in any order, to hear what's really going on.
“Johnny Cash heard Hurt and knew at once it was his.”
His first verdict was the opposite. Talking to Time in July 2003, Cash credited the idea to his producer: "It was [producer] Rick Rubin's idea." Then his own first reaction: "I think it's probably the best antidrug song I ever heard, but I don't think it's for me." The song now heard as his farewell started out, by the account he gave Time, as one he didn't think was for him.
“The famous thorns line in Hurt is Reznor's.”
That word is Cash's. In Reznor's 1994 recording, the second verse has a profanity in that spot; Cash sang "thorns" instead. American Songwriter's Rick Moore pointed it out in 2013, and you can hear it by playing the two versions back to back. If you know the line with thorns in it, you know Johnny Cash's line, not Reznor's. Go back and listen.
“The Hurt video was always meant to show Cash frail.”
The first plan, AP reported, was a Los Angeles soundstage, dropped because Cash was too ill to travel. The shoot moved to his Tennessee home and the closed House of Cash museum. Mark Romanek told Rolling Stone he found it in "such a state of dereliction. That's when I got the idea that maybe we could be extremely candid about the state of Johnny's health." The candor came from the building.
“Trent Reznor was sold on the idea the moment Cash wanted Hurt.”
Not at first. Reznor told Alternative Press in 2004 he was flattered, but "the idea sounded a bit gimmicky to me." Then he saw Mark Romanek's video, and said it meant "that song isn't mine anymore." After Cash died in September 2003, he said, "The song's purpose shifted again." Three verdicts on one song, all from the man who wrote it.
“Reznor built The Downward Spiral around Hurt.”
Reznor has said it was nearly left off. In Metal Hammer in 2005 he said: "Hurt was the last song I wrote... it nearly didn't make it on." The song Johnny Cash would carry onto the last studio album released in his lifetime almost stayed off Reznor's album entirely. Play Cash's version knowing how close it came to having nothing to cover.
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