Hurt

Rick Rubin stripped Trent Reznor's industrial self-laceration down to acoustic guitar, a sparse piano figure, and the sound of a seventy-year-old man's ruined voice, and in doing so transferred the song's ownership permanently. Cash's instrument here is barely functional — audibly frayed, wavering in pitch, unable to sustain — and that damage is the arrangement's most important element. Where Reznor sang about self-destruction from inside it, Cash sings it from the far end, near death, with June Carter dying in the next room. The lyric's "empire of dirt" line, which reads as adolescent nihilism from a young man, becomes an actual accounting of a life from Cash: the addiction, the wreckage, the fame. The piano, played sparely and slightly behind the beat, builds toward a moment where the whole arrangement swells and then abandons him again. He changes one word — "crown of shit" to "crown of thorns" — pulling the song into his own Christian vocabulary. Recorded during the American sessions and released in his final years, it's less a cover than a deathbed reading. Not a song for company. Best alone, late, with the lights off and nothing scheduled afterward.