It wasn’t my song any more.”īy the time of American IV: The Man Comes Around, Cash’s fourth album with Rubin, that feeling of having your song creatively annexed by The Man In Black was shared by many songwriters who’d been covered in the series. I thought: ‘What a powerful piece of art.’ I never got to meet Johnny, but I’m happy I contributed in the way I did. It was a reminder of what an important medium music is. “What I had written in my diary was now superimposed on the life of this icon and sung so beautifully and emotionally. “I wasn’t prepared for what I saw,” Reznor said. It was so extreme that it really took my breath away – and not in a good way. “I thought it was beautiful, but it was unlike any video I’d ever seen before. “It really upset me, and it really affected me,” Rubin told National Public Radio. “There was something about the juxtaposition of Johnny as a young, vibrant man and Johnny towards the end of his life that was really powerful.” “When we dropped in the first clip of Johnny riding the train, we got chills,” recalled Romanek, who won both a Grammy and Country Music Association award for the video. Directed by Mark Romanek, it unfolded like a four-minute mini-biography, blending archival footage, home movies, and a performance as stark as the song itself.

What changed his opinion, and what ultimately lifted Hurt to an entirely different level, was the video for it. Hearing it was like someone kissing your girlfriend. “It was this other person inhabiting my most personal song. “I listened to it and it was very strange,” he said. Rubin later said there were times that Johnny “sounded broken,” but they tried to turn that into a positive.ĭespite being “flattered” when told that Cash was covering his song, Trent Reznor had his reservations when they first sent him the track. The open space in the Hurt backing track revealed all the creaks and crags in Cash’s voice. But we really tried to step up for Johnny, even above and beyond the usual call.” You always try to do your best, no matter what you’re doing. Tench, who played on four of the five Cash/Rubin albums, told JamBands (opens in new tab), “It was just staggering to be in a room with Johnny Cash, playing all those songs. Fast forward to 2002, when Rubin and Cash, recording in the producer’s living room, had settled on a bare-bones arrangement for their Hurt cover – an arpeggiated acoustic guitar, flecked with tasteful touches of organ and piano by the Heartbreakers’ Benmont Tench.

Rusty cage johnny cash