Trent Resnor from Nine Inch Nails wrote the song and he was none too happy about Johnny covering it. I remember he hadn't been on the radio for about 10 years and then this put him in the media again. He wrote the song about heroin addiction. I saw the Johnny Cash video the day it premiered and I have all of his American recordings. I thought the song was autobiographical because when he said "I hurt myself today to see if I still feel" and the "the needle tears a hole, that old familiar stain." I thought of him being a diabetic and having to give himself insulin over and over and over again. Trent wrote it about heroin. Then when he said "What have I become, my sweetest friend." "Everyone I know goes away in the end." I think of Waylon Jennings dying and of his wife June's failing health. It could have been written by him. It fits him. If you listen to the American recordings you can tell that he was very weak. I put "heart of gold" on a lot and play along with it. The man was struggling though but he told Rick Reuben that he needed to stay busy or he'd die. It kept him going. U2's song One is very hard to listen to. There's a Tom Petty song too that sounds like he's running out of time. I miss Waylon and Johnny a lot.
It sounds here that Mr Reznor was "OK" with Johnny doing Hurt.
Trent Raznor on Johnny Cash & Hurt Trent Reznor talks Johnny Cash
Chris VinnicombeAugust 05, 2008, 09:39 UTC
Nine Inch Nails lynchpin Trent Reznor has spoken about hearing Johnny Cash's spellbinding cover of Hurt for the first time.
Hurt originally appeared on the 1994 Nine Inch Nails album The Downward Spiral. The fourth album in the American Recordings series, 2002's American IV: The Man Comes Around, saw Johnny Cash record an amazing reworking under the guidance of Rick Rubin.
In a recent interview with a British newspaper, Reznor spoke in depth about the Cash version of Hurt:
"I'd been friends with Rick Rubin for several years. He called me to ask how I'd feel if Johnny Cash covered Hurt. I said I'd be very flattered but was given no indication it would actually be recorded.
"Hearing it was like someone kissing your girlfriend."
"Two weeks went by. Then I got a CD in the post. I listened to it and it was very strange. It was this other person inhabiting my most personal song.
"I'd known where I was when I wrote it. I know what I was thinking about. I know how I felt. Hearing it was like someone kissing your girlfriend. It felt invasive".
It was the moving video, though, that made it all fall into place for the Nine Inch Nails star: "It really, really made sense and I thought what a powerful piece of art.
"I never got to meet Johnny but I'm happy I contributed the way I did. It felt like a warm hug. For anyone who hasn't seen it, I highly recommend checking it out. I have goose bumps right now thinking about it.
"Having Johnny Cash, one of the greatest singer-songwriters of all time, want to cover your song, that's something that matters to me. It's not so much what other people think but the fact that this guy felt that it was worthy of interpreting.
"He said afterwards it was a song that sounds like one he would have written in the '60s and that's wonderful".
In case you've spent the last few years living on the moon, check out the Johnny Cash version of Hurt here, while here's video footage of Reznor performing his original.
(via The Sun)