How Johnny Cash and Rick Rubin made ‘Hurt’
Despite having a glittering songwriting career throughout the second half of the 20th Century, when Johnny Cash recorded a cover of Nine Inch Nail’s ‘Hurt’ in 2002, it would become one of his most cherished songs. The track first arrived on NIN’s 1994 album The Downward Spiral and received a Grammy Award nomination for ‘Best Rock Song’ in 1996. However, nobody sang it better than ‘The Man in Black’.
Rick Rubin took care of production for Cash’s cover, which they recorded for Cash’s 2002 album American IV: The Man Comes Around. The music video is equally as poignant as his performance and features several images from Cash’s life. With it, he made Trent Reznor’s song his own, giving it a new lease of life and a new artistic meaning,
Discussing the origins of the cover, Rubin once told Rolling Stone, “Johnny and I would make collections of songs as possible covers for him to sing, and we’d send them to each other. ‘Hurt’ was one that I sent. There were maybe 20 songs, including that one on the mix I made, and it wasn’t one that he responded to.”
However, Rubin had a “strong feeling” about ‘Hurt’ so he included the suggestion in his next round of offers to Cash. “Because of the way the Nine Inch Nails song sounds, I think it was hard for him to hear it,” Rubin added. “So I sent him the lyrics, and I said, ‘Just read the lyrics. If you like the lyrics, then we’ll find a way to do it that will suit you.’”
Eventually, Cash came around to the idea of taking on the cover. “We recorded at my house in Los Angeles. We built all of it from scratch,” Rubin said. “It’s an acoustic song, so it was recorded as a smaller acoustic song than it ended up becoming, and through overdubs, we built all the drama that’s in the song to support the power of the words and the way Johnny was delivering them.”
The song went on to become one of Cash’s most famous, and Rubin noted that he had tried to pick songs that suited Cash’s voice as he had grown ill. “There were times when his voice sounded broken. He tried to turn that into a positive in the selection of the music,” he said. “He was awfully troubled by the way his voice was sounding. A lot of times during the process, he would be down on himself. He could always rely on his voice, and at this stage, he couldn’t.”
Despite feeling bad about his voice, by the time the cover was completed, Cash felt great pride for the final product. “It was a real struggle for him,” Rubin said. “But then, when we put everything together, and it was done, he would love it.”
