I've always loved cover songs, provided a few caveats: the coverer has to add their own distinctive style to the song, and they have to improve upon the original. Cash easily does both. Trent Reznor even said the following about the video:
- I pop the video in, and wow… Tears welling, silence, goose-bumps... Wow. I just lost my girlfriend, because that song isn't mine anymore... It really made me think about how powerful music is as a medium and art form. 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. [Somehow] that winds up reinterpreted by a music legend from a radically different era/genre and still retains sincerity and meaning--different, but every bit as pure.
Although the song was released on his 2002 album, American IV: The Man Comes Around, the video is interpreted as after his wife's death--Johhny followed his wife into the grave four short months later. It's heartbreaking to watch Johnny's shaking hands spill a glass of wine on a feast table as images of June and his life flicker on the screen.
I couldn't help but tear up watching an old man mourn for his wife, waiting for death to take him so that they could be reunited.
You can find the video here.
