Johnny Cash's Hurt: the story and meaning behind the classic song | Louder
Johnny Cash’s cover of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt never should have worked. Even Cash had his doubts at first. “When I heard the record, I said: ‘I can’t do that song. It’s not my style,” he said. But after four successful albums with Rick Rubin, he trusted the producer’s sometimes left-field instincts. Rubin had already introduced him to songs by Soundgarden and Tom Waits, and sensed that the Trent Reznor's ballad Hurt might unlock something deeply personal in the singer. He told Cash: “Just read the lyrics. If you like the lyrics, then we’ll find a way to do it to suit you.” The song that its writer once called a “valentine to the sufferer” had some dark origins. In the early 90s, Reznor rented a house in LA’s Benedict Canyon that had once been owned by actress Sharon Tate and was the scene of her gruesome murder in 1969 by the Manson family. The faint outline of the word ‘pig’ was still visible where it had been scrawled on the door the night of the killing. Reznor named his studio Le Pig. When he later moved out, he said “there was too much history in that house for me to handle”, and after meeting Tate’s sister that he “didn’t want to be looked at as a guy who supports serial-killer bullshit”. It’s where Hurt was conceived. “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,” Reznor told Alternative Press. It became the closing track on The Downward Spiral, Nine Inch Nails’ breakthrough, and one of the biggest albums of the 90s.