“What Are You Thinking?” – Johnny Cash Thought Rick Rubin’s Idea To Cover NIN’s “Hurt” Was Insane

Johnny Cash’s rendition of “Hurt” is considered to be one of the greatest cover songs of all time.

It was so impactful that Trent Reznor, the lead man for Nine Inch Nails and the writer of the song, once admitted that the song wasn’t his anymore. Cash had made the dark, emotional track his own, and the famous music video that’s paired alongside the cover is powerful enough to create instant water works.

And that was mostly thanks to legendary producer Rick Rubin.

Rubin sat down with Rick Beato recently to talk about his incredible career as a producer, and just as “Hurt” will forever be associated with Johnny Cash as one of his final pieces of work, Rubin will always be attached to the song since he was the one that convinced Cash to cover it.

As he explains in the interview, Rubin and Cash had a formula for picking out songs to cover, and the producer was always looking for something in particular when it came to potential cover songs:

“At that time, I had already made five albums with Johnny. This was on the sixth album, and he was always looking for songs. He would write one or two songs typically on an album and the rest would be covers. And what I came to realize was things that worked best… the key was the lyrics. If the lyrics were right, it didn’t really matter what genre the music was or where it came from.”

Rubin liked finding songs that were sort of out of the box – at least when it came to having Johnny Cash cover them. He recalled another cover the pair had worked on that Johnny wasn’t a big fan initially. Cash apparently reacted to it in the same way that he reacted to the NIN song being pitched:

“I remember one of the early ones we did. We did a Soundgarden song, ‘Rusty Cage.’ That was one of the first ones where, I remember sending him the Chris Cornell version – the Soundgarden version – and he listened to it and he’s like, ‘What are you thinking? I can’t sing that.’ When I sent him the Nine Inch Nails song, he just thought I was crazy.”

But Rubin, as he explained earlier, knows what makes a good song a good song. He’s kind of notorious for that.

So “Hurt” stuck out to him, and he continued to send it to Johnny as an idea… even though the country music legend he was working opposite of had different feelings about it:

“In Trent’s version, this beautiful song is buried in this sound. That’s what he was going for, and it’s beautiful. But when I played that for Johnny, he didn’t hear the song. I sent him a burned CD of probably 25 potential songs, and that was number one.

When he called me back, he didn’t respond to that one. He responded to a couple of others. And then the next CD I sent him, it was number one again. It’s one of the only songs that I probably sent him three times in these compilations I’d send of songs to consider.”

Finally, after multiple attempts at trying to get Johnny to hear it himself and get on board, Rubin had to come out and be blunt. The producer singled out the NIN song, and as he tells the story, Cash only understood where he was coming from when he provided a demo for what he envisioned the Johnny version being:

“There’s that song that I sent you, and he was like, ‘I don’t hear it at all.’ And then I think I might have done a demo. I was in the studio with Smokey Hormel working on something else, and I had Smokey play the acoustic part and I might have sang the vocals myself. I said, ‘It can sound like this. Just read the lyrics.’ And I think that’s what convinced him. He said, ‘I’ll only do it when we’re together.'”

Johnny said that, “I’ll only do it when we’re together” part because – with his old age and failing health – he rarely ever left his home to record new material. Rubin would often be in California communicating back and forth with Cash, basically working together remotely before it was commonplace to do so.

But Johnny knew with “Hurt” that he wanted to be in the same room as Rubin in the recording process, and traveled out to California one last time to record the song that’s now viewed as one of his famous – even though it’s not actually his.

You can hear more about the origins of Cash’s “Hurt” cover in the in-depth interview with Rick Rubin below:

Gas it up:

Johnny Cash – “Hurt”

The post “What Are You Thinking?” – Johnny Cash Thought Rick Rubin’s Idea To Cover NIN’s “Hurt” Was Insane first appeared on Whiskey Riff.