“Tears welling, silence, goosebumps”: The moment Trent Reznor heard Johnny Cash’s ‘Hurt’
One of those facts that no matter how many times you hear it, it still feels wrong is that Johnny Cash’s hit ‘Hurt’ is actually a Nine Inch Nails song.
The first time someone informed me, I laughed. I thought they surely must be messing with me. The two acts exist in realms so far away in my mind that I didn’t understand how anything could bridge them, or how on earth that even could have come about.
There’s also the fact that ‘Hurt’ just feels so Johnny Cash. Crooning, “I wear this crown of thorns/ Upon my liar’s chair / Full of broken thoughts / I cannot repair,” the 2003 single sounds like it could have been from back in the 1950s, with the narrator’s defeated voice that doesn’t feel too far off from a song like ‘Folsom Prison Blues’.
Cash still embodies that classic, sad cowboy as if the track is a melodramatic, emotional moment from a western flick, to the point where it feels more his than it does a Nine Inch Nails song, especially when looking at the lyrics written down. Still, while the coming together of those two acts, separated by decades and genres, feels too surreal, it happened. Initially, ‘Hurt’ was released by the band in 1994 on their second album, The Downward Spiral. From them, the album closer is sparse and spooky. Reznor’s voice is timid, a little glitchy, gothic and even a little creepy, sounding like a sad and lonely suicide note until it booms to a climax.
Cash’s version is different, though. With the simple acoustic guitar backing, bringing it into the country ballad world, it feels more mighty, like a wise, old man submitting to his heartache and misery. His voice sounds so confident on the song, which too contributes to it feeling like it was always his.
At first, that kind of bugged Reznor. “I was flattered, but frankly, the idea sounded a bit gimmicky to me,” he told Alternative Press about the initial reaction to hearing that Cash wanted to sing the song, and when he first heard it, he wasn’t a fan at all, as he said, “It sounded…weird to me. That song in particular was straight from my soul, and it felt very strange hearing the highly identifiable voice of Johnny Cash singing it. It was a good version, and I certainly wasn’t cringing or anything.”
Something about it felt wrong, though, as Reznor likened hearing Cash sing his personal song to “watching my girlfriend fuck somebody else”.
But down the line, he’d admit that the first time he heard the song, he wasn’t really listening, distracted by the weirdness, which once it dissipated, he hit play again, and this time, he properly listened. Hearing the pain in Cash’s voice and hearing his own words translated into this new format, his impression changed. “Wow. I just lost my girlfriend, because that song isn’t mine anymore,” he said, recalling that moment of “Tears welling, silence, goosebumps”.
It all changed then. “It all made sense to me,” he explained as the cover truly reignited a belief in the power of art once he gave it a chance. “It really made me think about how powerful music is as a medium and art form. I wrote some words and music in my bedroom as a way of staying sane, about a bleak and desperate place I was in, totally isolated and alone,” he said, moved and awed as he added, “Some-fucking-how that winds up reinterpreted by a music legend from a radically different era/genre and still retains sincerity and meaning different, but every bit as pure.”
