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If you’re familiar with Johnny Cash’s cover of popular Nine Inch Nails song, ‘Hurt’, you’ll have noticed two things: first, it’s that rare breed of cover that stands shoulder to shoulder with the original; second, the official music video does, indeed, ‘hurt’. That is to say, it’s real, it’s genuine – Cash is feeling it, and it shows. There’s a story to that.
Music video director, Mark Romanek (also the man behind the underappreciated Robin Williams 2002 psychological drama, ‘One Hour Photo’), had this to say:
‘I begged Rick Rubin to let me shoot something to that track. I even offered to do it for free.
I began to scouting locations for it after flying to Nashville, eventually deciding on Cash’s own house. It was largely in a state of disrepair as he was in his last days.
It had been closed for a long time. The place was in such a state of dereliction.
That’s when I got the idea that maybe we could be extremely candid about the state of Johnny’s health – as candid as Johnny has always been in his songs. The results speak for themselves.
Johnny’s wife June died three months after it was filmed with Johnny passing too four months after that.’
As for Rubin, himself, he was as moved as most listeners:
‘I cried the first time I saw it. If you were moved to that kind of emotion in the course of a two-hour movie, it would be a great accomplishment. To do it in a four-minute music video is shocking.’
It is a terrific video and cover. Johnny Cash always did sing with utter conviction, but this is next-level in its truth and emotion. FYI: if you enjoyed this, please do check out his cover of Neil Young’s ‘Heart of Gold’, which, in my humble opinion, surpasses the original.
Bit of a genre leap, here, but, on the subject of good music videos, how about some Radiohead?
