“Hurt”—Johnny Cash

Listen as Rob celebrates the life and career of the music icon who is Johnny Cash and his 2002 legendary cover of “Hurt.” Along the way, Rob discusses Cash’s work with Rick Rubin and much more. Later, Rob is joined by the Ringer’s Brian Phillips to further celebrate Johnny Cash’s greatness. Host: Rob Harvilla Guest: Brian Phillips Producers: Jonathan Kermah and Justin Sayles Additional Production Support: Olivia Crerie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  I'm Yasi Solak and I'm here to announce a brand new season of my Ringer original podcast, Bandsplain, the show where we explain cult bands and iconic artists to you and yours. This time, babe, we're going across the pond. That's right, I'm absolutely chuffed to be talking about the music scenes of 80s and 90s Britain. I'm talking Madchester, I'm talking baggy, I'm talking shoegaze, I'm talking Britpop, mate. So tune in every Thursday starting November 7th for a new episode of Bandsplain on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  For decades, a shadowy organization called the Lemonati has kept lemon on top and lime in the shadows. Look around, lemon-forward sodas, even lemon-forward songs. We ran the tracks, slowed them down, reversed them, and squeezed out the truth.

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• 1:18Speaker 04

  Hello, friends. Just a quick announcement. The announcement is that 60 Songs that explain the 90s, cool in the 2000s, and Bandsplain are joining forces once again for a live show in Los Angeles early in the new year, and we'd be delighted if you'd join us. On Wednesday, January 29th, 2025, I, Rob Harvilla, and my work daughter, Bandsplain's Yasi Solak, will do a show live from the Lodge Room in Highland Park. I don't know where that is in LA exactly, but I bet it's real nice. Tickets for this 60 Songs Bandsplain Summit will go on sale this Friday, December 13th, at 10 a.m. Pacific, and they can be

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  purchased at theringer.com/events. To repeat, Yasi and I will be live from the Lodge Room in Highland Park in LA on Wednesday, January 29th, and you can get more info at theringer.com/events and also buy tickets there, starting this Friday, December 13th, at 10 a.m. Pacific. Come see me wince when I talk in person. Thanks for listening and hope to see you there.

• 2:32Speaker 04

  You can hear it so clearly, so painfully in his voice, in the tremor, in the terrifying frailty of his voice. It's his time. He has lived a world historically full and rich and meaningful life, but he is almost gone. He is fading away visibly, audibly, painfully, valiantly. He is singing you a song about how he's fading away. He is waving goodbye. He is leaving us, not today, not tomorrow, but soon. He is singing us one of the last songs he'll ever sing us. He is singing a song we know already, a famous song written and originally sung by a much younger man.

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  And the original song is animated by that younger man's totally legitimate pain and sadness and regret. But now, this much older man is going to show us what pain and sadness and regret sounds like when you know you're almost gone. So it's time to say goodbye. Say goodbye to this voice you'd grown up with, this voice your parents and your grandparents grew up with, this voice your parents and grandparents probably loved, this voice you probably loved too. This voice is perhaps synonymous for you with a jukebox, with a car radio, with an open road, with country music, with the 20th century, with America.

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  If you know enough about him, maybe you also associate his voice with drugs, with jail, with divorce, with a certain fundamental rock star depravity, with a tentative and hard-fought redemption. You know this voice, the authority, the beauty, the divinity, the command in his voice, reduced on this song to something so much weaker and therefore so much more powerful. It's not a given that he'll even make it all the way through the song. It's not a given that you will either.

• 4:43Speaker 04

  It is 2011 and Glen Campbell is waving goodbye. He is 75 years old and he has announced that he's been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. His mind will wave goodbye before his body does. Glen Campbell put out his first album in 1962 and then he put out, what, 58 more albums? And sung, what, at least a dozen songs you know intimately, even if you've never listened to a single Glen Campbell song by choice. Wichita Lineman, Gentle On My Mind, By The Time I Get To Phoenix, Rhinestone Cowboy? Sure, Rhinestone Cowboy. And now Glen figures he's got one more album in him. And he's calling this album Ghost On The Canvas.

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  That album title alone is designed to make you cry. Everything about this album is designed to make you cry, especially this song about getting invited to the last dance and then having to leave.

• 5:59Speaker 04

  Right, okay, sure, but what, what, what, what, what, what did Glen Campbell just say? Animal mother, she opens up for free? Excuse you? All right, Glen Campbell is singing a Guided By Voices song. A Guided By Voices song called Hold On Hope. Guided by voices, the pride, the joy, the heart, the liver, the beer-swilling id, the Rhinestone Cowboys of Dayton, Ohio. Lo-fi gods, indie rock gods, rock and roll gods, gods, period. Guided by voices, led by singer and songwriter and national icon, Robert Pollard. Dude, I am so afraid to look this up, but I gotta look it up now.

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  Okay, Robert Pollard was born 21 years after Glen Campbell was born. That's cool. I thought they were gonna be like five years apart somehow and I was gonna have to go walk into the sea. Guided by Voices formed in 1983 and have put out, what, 600 albums? 6,000? A phenomenal band. A singularly phenomenal band. Phenomenally prolific, yes. But more importantly, Guided by Voices songs have just this surrealist, majestically ramshackle, but phenomenally tuneful aura to them. Pristine, but also confounding, but also depraved,

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  but also profound, but also often like 60 seconds long. And Guided by Voices songs are not historically written in a country music vernacular. Can we agree on that? I don't even know if I agree with that, but I do like saying it. Broadly speaking, Guided by Voices songs are not conventionally sentimental or coherent enough to work as straightforward, weepy country music. Hold on, Hope is an exception. Or at least Glen Campbell singing Hold on, Hope is an exception.

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  It's the last thing that's holding me. Oh my God. How are you not crying right now? How am I not crying right now? How am I gonna keep this from getting crazy maudlin? Why bother trying? Hold on, Hope first appeared on the 1999 Guided by Voices album Do the Collapse, which kicked off the band's much debated sellout era. Up until then, Guided by Voices songs generally sounded like you're listening to them on a five-year-old's string telephone, you know, where you connect two cups with string, except now they're red solo cups still full of beer that you pour directly into your ear, preferably Budweiser. But now suddenly this album, Do the Collapse, is super clean, super poppy, super slick,

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  ostensibly super radio-friendly.

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  Do the Collapse is produced by Rick Ocasek, the guy who produced Weezer's Blue Album. And also, of course, he's the guy from The Cars, one of my all-time favorite bands. Rick Ocasek, who died in 2019, was born eight years after Glen Campbell and 13 years before Robert Pollard. Just FYI. Some people really hate Do the Collapse for its conventional slickness and poppiness and corniness. And Robert Pollard is probably one of those people. Talking to the website Song Facts about Hold On Hope, Robert says, quote, "I actually dreamed it. The melody and main line, anyway. I apologized to Rick because I thought it might be a little

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  cheesy and slightly embarrassing because it came from a dream. But he said, 'No, it's the power ballad that radio is looking for.'" And that really scared me. End quote. It turns out Hold On Hope was not the power ballad radio was looking for, but the bridge to this song, man, the bridge to this song when Glen Campbell sings the bridge.

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  And these lines have a classic arbitrary shaggy guided by voices type accidental majesty to them, right? Like our old buddy Bob Pollard was midway through writing the song and he got distracted by an old Western movie on TV. But Glen Campbell, Glen Campbell in this moment, Glen Campbell waving goodbye as he sings, "Look at the talk box, mute frustration at the station, there rides the cowboy." Oof. Oof. The phrase mute frustration in particular. The phrase campfire flickering on the landscape in particular. Oof. Oof.

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  Oof. The cowboy is riding away. The flickering campfire is flickering out. Glen Campbell has an even more devastating waving goodbye song called "I'm Not Gonna Miss You, But I'm Not Gonna Play It For You." And I may in fact never listen to it again. Too beautiful, too devastating, too much. Oof. "Hold On Hope" is not a personal favorite of Robert Pollard's. He once told Goldmine magazine, quote, "I remember hearing 'Hold On Hope' in a CVS store on some contemporary adult station. It came on right after a Kenny G song, and I just covered my face and slinked out to my car," end quote. And that's funny.

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  Bob probably wrote a whole song in his head about how embarrassed he was before he got back to his car. But in that Songfax interview, Bob also says, quote, "I ended up liking it later down the line, especially when Glen Campbell covered it and validated it. I guess it's got a good message. I don't know. It's not very punk, is it?" End quote. Well, punk according to whom?

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  You gonna tell me that Willie Nelson covering Coldplay's "The Scientist" ain't punk? This cover once soundtrack to Chipotle ad. Shout out to Chipotle's Chicken Al Pastor with the pineapple. Three Chicken Al Pastor tacos, please. Soft tacos with corn salsa, sour cream cheese, and just a little lettuce. But no, wait, come on. A Chipotle ad is objectively not punk. Okay, okay. But Willie Nelson, in 2011, at the ripe old age of 78, covering Coldplay's majestic, sentimental, exactly what the radio is looking for, 2002 jam "The Scientist," and reinvigorating "The Scientist."

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  With the breezy, jazzy, sobering, but also galactically stoned poignancy that only Willie Nelson can provide, that's punk rock in its own way. A grizzled country music eminence showing those young pompous conventional arena rockers how it's done. Willie Nelson, as I speak these words, is 91 years old. By the way, he is older than Bob Pollard, Rick Ocasek, and Glen Campbell, but Willie Nelson will never die. He will never fade away, or wave goodbye, or flicker out on the landscape. Never. You hear me? Neither will she.

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  My goodness, the mustard Dolly Parton just put on the word peculiar. That's why she's the best. I dig it when timeless, beloved country superstars cover extremely era-specific rock songs. I dig it when Dolly Parton covers the polarizing and delightful 1993 hit "What's Up" by Four Nonblondes. Dolly covers this song in her 2023 album Rockstar, which also features her renditions of classic tunes by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Queen, Led Zeppelin, Blondie, Prince, and REO Speedwagon, etc. You get the idea. I won't tell you how old Dolly Parton is, because I am a gentleman.

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  Dolly Parton is older than Robert Pollard. Leave it at that. I heard about this next one on the internet, and I've been pretty nervous about listening to it, but I guess it's time.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  All right, cool. It turns out I still dig it when timeless, only slightly less beloved country superstars cover significantly less era confined rock songs, even when it's the Oak Ridge Boys in 2009, covering Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes. Pretty intense piano, fellas. That's not not punk rock, eh? When the band that would become the Oak Ridge Boys first got together, World War II wasn't over yet. But now the Oak Ridge Boys just occasionally swap out some of their older guys for younger guys, so maybe they won't ever die either. Like that tech bro gets blood transfusions, so he never

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  ages. Yeah, we've established the country stars covering rock hits conceit, but we've lost the waving goodbye conceit. Hold on, let's recalibrate. This might hurt a bit.

• 16:32Speaker 04

  Of course he's country. I'm gonna let you tell Warren Zevon that he ain't country, or punk rock for that matter. Warren Zevon's final album, called The Wind, came out in September 2003, two weeks before he died of lung cancer. He was 56. He was waving goodbye. So he covered Bob Dylan's Knockin' on Heaven's Door. Painfully literal and quite moving. Could I have talked you into the idea that Warren Zevon was specifically covering the 1991 Guns N' Roses cover of Bob Dylan's Knockin' on Heaven's Door? Maybe. Can I talk you into the idea that this is John Prine covering Metallica?

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  If I should die before I wake, etc. This is John Prine's cover of Enter Sandman by Metallica. That's not convincing at all. That's not believable. No, that's a John Prine original called God Only Knows because John Prine is the only songwriter good enough to sing a song called God Only Knows that isn't a cover of God Only Knows by The Beach Boys. John Prine's final album, called The Tree of Forgiveness, came out in April 2018, two years before he died of symptoms of COVID-19. He was 73. He was waving goodbye. Okay, now we just got to combine country cover of rock song with waving goodbye again. One more song first, though.

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  Johnny Cash never walked no line. Johnny Cash never did no time, but when he sang a forceful prison blues, you knew good and well it paid his dues.

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  Merle Haggard's final album, a collaboration with our old friend Willie Nelson called Django and Jimmy, came out in June 2015. Merle died 10 months later of pneumonia. He was 79. He was waving goodbye. Merle's not going to cover some random surprising rock and roll song while he's waving goodbye. That is not Merle's way. Instead, he waved goodbye in part with this song called Missing Old Johnny Cash. Notice that Merle honors his friend by not necessarily deifying him. The miracle, the greatness, the essential humanness of Johnny Cash is that he did not

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  generally walk the line, but we loved him and more importantly, believed him when he sang the song, "I Walked the Line." Furthermore, Merle is about to tenderly sing the word "pills."

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  Truly always dressed in black, but he loved the folks and they loved him back. Carried his pills in a brown paper sack. I don't care if they found his stash, I'm missing old Johnny Cash.

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  Plus, at the end of this song, Merle and Willie just swap Johnny Cash debauchery stories. I think Willie wins. One time he took a casket up to his hotel room and got Into it and call room service. I thought that was pretty funny.

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  I like to imagine Johnny somehow propped his hotel room door open and lay there patiently in his open casket and very slowly sat up as the room service guy entered the room with his cheeseburger. So when you're a country music or country music adjacent legend and you want to wave goodbye with an ultra sentimental mic drop tearjerker, you can sing one somebody else wrote, or sing one you wrote yourself. Or if you're Merle, I guess you avoid the tearjerker aspect altogether and you get together with another legend and you sing a fun jaunty song about waving back at somebody who'd already waved goodbye. Somebody we lost

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  20 plus years ago, but who still feels present, who is somehow still out there riding somewhere. A cowboy flickering on the landscape, but never quite blinking out. Johnny Cash will live forever because he died the way he lived. Which is to say Johnny Cash waved goodbye harder than anyone who's ever lived. We're gonna get through this together.

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  What have I become?

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  My sweetest friend.

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  My name is Rob Harvilla. This is the 10th episode of 60 Songs That Explain the 90s, Cole and the 2000s. And this week, we are discussing Hurt by Johnny Cash. We are discussing Johnny Cash's cover of the Nine Inch Nails song Hurt. Johnny's version appeared on his 2002 album, American 4, The Man Comes Around, the last album he released before his death on September 12, 2003, from complications of diabetes. He was 71. We will talk about the Hurt video.

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  All right, I put on the Hurt video a couple nights ago and I just cried. I did not expect that. My kids were in the next room and I kept worrying they were gonna amble into my room and see me crying and freak out. That is generally not my way. Outright crying at stuff, crying at music videos. But yeah, man, I lost it for like 20 different reasons, including the gravity, the resignation, the authority with which Johnny Cash sings the words, "Everyone I know goes away in the end."

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  Everyone I know goes away in the end.

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  How am I gonna keep this from getting crazy maudlin?

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  I got a few ideas, or anyway, I got a few frivolous distractions. Ooh, here's one. Look out. Top three Guided by Voices songs I wish Johnny Cash had covered. Here we go. Number three, "My Valuable Hunting Knife."

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  I want to start a new life with my valuable hunting knife. She will shine like a new girl and I want to shout out my love to the world.

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  Hit it. We gotta change the key or something, but Johnny would absolutely nail this. Johnny would invest this song with the authority of a man who very likely owned hundreds, if not thousands, of valuable hunting knives, even if he never actually hunted anything with any of them. Number two, "Fourteen Cheerleader Cold Front."

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  Fourteen cheerleader cold front. Put your nose beyond. Creeping boys in alleys. Find them when you're gone.

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  A huge part of the attraction here, of course, is just the chance to hear Johnny Cash sing the phrase "14 Cheerleader Coldfront." But given the dulcet dueling voices here, Tobin Sprout, we got one-time Guided by Voices "Not So Secret Weapon," Tobin Sprout crooning alongside our guy Bob Pollard here. I see this as a Johnny Cash and June Carter duet. This would have gone over huge at Folsom Prison. This could have been better than "Jackson." And finally, the number one Guided by Voices song I wish Johnny Cash had covered, you guessed it, "The Goldheart Mountain Top Queen Directory."

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  Tell me this one have kicked nine kinds of ass. Johnny Cash rumbling through this one with Ring of Fire energy, the walls of Folsom Prison, the walls of Jericho tumbling all around him. I think you can understand why the guy who wrote this, why Bob Pollard would physically flee in terror from a CBS just because one of his sweeter and cheesier songs came on after a Kenny G song. But I do think this one has an oddly affecting gospel music type intensity that Johnny would immediately recognize.

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  June can sing that one too, if she wants. "I just watched the Hurt video again and almost cried again, but I didn't. I held it together this time." I think that's progress. The cracked gold record for at San Quentin, sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall, that almost got me, though. We're gonna get through this together. Here, I will give you a quick moment to compose yourself.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  The Lemonati has spent decades keeping lemon on top and lime in the shadows. Their lemon agenda has infiltrated everything, even our music. That hit song named after the color of lemons? Not a coincidence. Big Lemon has been pulling strings in the industry for years. Think about it. But now, 7Up is fighting back with their new Lime Lemon Soda. Now lime comes first. 7Up, Flip the Sep.

• 26:42Speaker 04

  I am the Johnny Cash of Ad Breaks. I am at least one of the Oak Ridge Boys of Ad Breaks. How detailed and laborious a Johnny Cash primer do you require? Come on now. Johnny Cash was born in Kingsland, Arkansas in 1932, and he grew up in nearby Dias, Arkansas. Johnny Cash and the Tennessee 2, that's Luther Perkins on guitar and Marshall Grant on bass, released his debut single for Sam Phillips's Sun Records in 1955. Hey Porter on the A side, Cry Cry Cry on the B side. Johnny released a single, "I Walked the Line" in 1956. He released his first concept album called Ride This Train in 1960.

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  He released the live album at Folsom Prison in 1968, the same year he married his second wife, June Carter. He hosted a variety TV show on ABC called The Johnny Cash Show that ran from 1969 to 1971. And he was attacked by an ostrich named Waldo in 1981. I skipped some stuff. I hit the highlights, though, I think. Getting attacked by an ostrich is one of those things that's extremely funny as long as it doesn't happen to you. He's Johnny Cash. That's the primer. That alone ought to bring us up to speed. Just to pick a random song from a random year, here's what Johnny Cash sounded like in 1962 on a song called "Deeley Is Gone."

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  Delia, oh Delia, Delia all my life. If I had a shot for Delia, I'da had her for my wife.

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  The semi jaunty backing vocals there might not be strictly necessary. A great deal of what's going on there musically might not be strictly necessary, as we might learn 35 years later. So first you get to know and love Johnny Cash through the hits, right? The monster hits, the hits that helped build America. I ain't gotta play you the hits again now, you already know them. Big River, I Still Miss Someone, Ring of Fire, A Boy Named Sue, Sunday Morning Coming Down, Man in Black, One Piece at a Time, and several dozen others. But then, in my experience, there's one song, and maybe even one line from one song that kickstarts your deeper dive into Johnny Cash,

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  your full awe-struck immersion. The specific line and the specific song is different for everybody. Johnny would make these wildly ambitious concept albums, right? With booming narration and super thoughtful historical conceits, and like train whistles and shit. Ride This Train in 1960. Johnny Cash sings The Ballads of the True West in 1965, and Bitter Tears, Ballads of the American Indian in 1964, featuring Johnny's famous version of the song, The Ballad of Ira Hayes, which is the story, the true story, the true American story, of Ira Hayes from the Pima Indian tribe,

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  who volunteered for the Marines and fought in World War II and helped raise the American flag over Iwo Jima in that super famous photo, and who later died of alcoholism. These are the Johnny Cash lines that got me, that truly startled me, that converted me, the abject sadness and the seething rage in this man's voice. This is a voice you will follow anywhere, no matter how dark a path he leads you down.

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  Yeah, call him drunken, Ira Hayes. But his land is just as dry, and his ghost is lying thirsty in the ditch where Ira died.

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  The chill that shot through me the first time I heard that, or maybe not even the first time I heard that, but the first time I fully processed that, the first time I truly heeded Johnny Cash's voice. And from that point on, any era, any record, any song, any line can come out of nowhere and hit me that hard. Johnny Cash made a ton of gospel albums also, even gospel concept albums, including one in 1973 called "The Gospel Road", the soundtrack to a whole movie he made about the life and death of Jesus Christ. And so I put this record on and I'm puttering about my house, doing whatever, and suddenly this line reaches out and slaps me in the back of the head.

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  Jesus said, "If the people keep quiet, the stones along the road will praise me."

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  Johnny Cash's personal spin on Luke 19, verse 40, rattled around in my head for the next 48 hours. "If the people keep quiet, the stones along the road will praise me." You believe in Johnny Cash. You believe in what he sings and what he says. He makes you believe what he believes. I think this came up before, but in 2003, I moved from Ohio out to Oakland, California, and I drove there with my father. We made a road trip out of it, 2,500 miles or so. And I took a turn driving in the dead of night in North Platte, Nebraska, during this wild, terrifying thunderstorm. And Dad's somehow asleep in the shotgun seat

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  and I'm white knuckling it as hard rain is pelting the windshield and giant bolts of lightning are tearing up the Nebraska horizon. And I got my little sleeve of emotional support CDs in my lap and I slipped one into my CD player. And whose voice do you suppose was there to comfort me?

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  San Quentin, may you rot and burn in hell.

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  May your walls fall and may I live to tell.

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  Okay, I wouldn't say this comforted me, per se. The vicious roar of the crowd of the prisoners at San Quentin on the 1969 Live album, At San Quentin, as Johnny Cash talked shit about San Quentin and fantasized about those walls tumbling down around him also. None of this is designed to comfort you, but I'll never forget that voice, that highway, that thunderstorm. This is what my country is made of. This is the very best of it. And the fear, the fear amid even his biggest fans by the time we get to the 80s, by the time Waldo the Ostrich puts him in the hospital, is that Johnny Cash's years as an unparalleled

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  and unstoppable force of nature are over. He's in his 50s, his albums ain't hitting, his singles ain't even charting, he's already lived six or seven lifetimes, harrowing lifetimes. He has risen and fallen, and risen and fallen. As our friend Merle Haggard gently observed, Johnny has struggled with substances, with pills mostly, amphetamines. Sometimes he's got that beat and sometimes it's brutally beating him. By the time the 80s are over, he'll be dropped by his longtime label, Columbia, and his next label, Mercury, won't know what to do with him either. One of this decade's few bright spots is when Johnny gets together with some old friends,

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  some old friends whose careers are currently quite a bit hotter than his own and may at least help keep him warm.

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  I'll fly a starship, across the universe divide.

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  The first album by the Highwaymen, the at least half a million dollar quartet of Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson, comes out in 1985. It's called Highwayman. This is the title track in the big hit, in which all four dudes take a verse, and in Johnny's verse, he literally flies a starship and makes you believe that-

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  He knows how Johnny's fellow highwaymen Willie Wayland and Chris are the beloved leading lights of the 70s outlaw country movement, which is very, very obviously inconceivable without the guiding light of 50s and 60s Johnny Cash. And yet 70s and 80s Johnny Cash is not quite able to vibe with or fully capitalize on this movement. And so now here he is swathed in soothing Reagan era gauze fantasizing about his next life and the next one and the next one.

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  The fear even amid his biggest fans is that Johnny Cash will not regain his throne and will not regain his footing as the Johnny Cash until he's in his next life or the next one or the next one, often some other universe entirely. But then two rock star types, two men, two earthlings intervene and build Johnny a new throne to sit upon. The first guy is a guy named Bono and actually Bono builds Johnny Cash that spaceship.

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  In 1993, the noted Irish arena rock band U2, about whom I have never had anything negative to say, U2 releases a rather confounding and gently experimental and endearingly futuristic sounding album called Zoo Ropa. And on the final track called The Wanderer, out of precisely nowhere, whose voice is there to comfort us and also confound us even further?

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  And nothing about the somnolent electric hum of this song suggests the presence of the man in black, but that's the whole point. See, the whole thrill of the Wanderer is the sheer audacious unlikelihood of encountering Johnny Cash in this bizarre alien universe. And see, Bono, U2's frontman, Bono's, his usual propensity for biblical drama and self-regard finds its ideal mouthpiece, its ideal vessel, in the Johnny Cash, who is in his 60s now, but still sounds like he walks around with a bible and a gun. He still sounds like the

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  word of God lays heavy on his heart. He still sounds, or suddenly, after a long slump, he sounds once again like he's sure he's the one. And he's sure he can get you to believe he's the one, too. In the giant 2013 biography Johnny Cash: The Life, written by the great LA rock journalist Robert Hillburn, Bono tells a story about having dinner with Johnny Cash in the late 80s. Bono says, quote, "We were all holding hands around the table, and Johnny said the most beautiful, most poetic grace you've ever heard. Then he leaned over to me with his devilish look in his eye and said, 'But I sure miss the drugs,'

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  end quote. And suddenly, that Johnny Cash is here again. He's audible again. He's in command again. Both guys are here, both sides of Johnny Cash. The sinner and the redeemer, the angel and the devil, the guy who recorded like half a dozen gospel albums minimum, and the guy who sure misses the drugs. Talking about the Wanderer, Johnny said, quote, "It's the search for three important things: God, that woman, and myself," end quote. We did not know, listening to this weird-ass conclusion to this weird-ass U2 album in 1993, whether Johnny would find God, or that woman, or himself. But at least

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  the search was on again.

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  And this could have been pretty much the end of it. A cool and loopy little coda to one of the greatest, the most impactful, the most heavenly and hellish careers in all of popular music. Johnny Cash waving goodbye from across the cosmos. Nothing left for him to do but tour for as long as he could, playing the old hits to smaller and smaller crowds, including a gig in 93 at the Rhythm Cafe in Santa Ana, California. You know who opened this show, apparently? Uncle Tupelo. Uncle Tupelo, opening for Johnny Cash. Wild, man. Fortunately for Johnny, fortunately for everyone, at this gig, one of the people in this smaller

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  crowd is Rick Rubin. And Rick Rubin and Johnny Cash meet backstage and they get to talking. And Rick Rubin's proposition for Johnny Cash, in essence, is, what if you get rid of everything that isn't strictly necessary?

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  Delia, oh, Delia. Delia all my life. If I hadn't shot, oh, Delia, I'd have had her for my wife.

• 41:23Speaker 04

  Delia's gone one more round. Johnny Cash released his 81st album on April 26, 1994. He called it "American Recordings." After his new record label, Rick Rubin's record label. Rick Rubin, you again. Fame guru-like producer for Public Enemy, LL Cool J, The Beastie Boys, The Ghetto Boys, Slayer, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tom Petty, and yes, huh, wow, Johnny Cash. In his 1997 autobiography, simply called Cash, Johnny describes Rick Rubin thus, quote, "He was the ultimate hippie, bald on top but with hair down over his shoulders, a beard

• 42:07Speaker 04

  that looked as if it had never been trimmed," parentheses, "it hadn't," and clothes that would have done a wino proud," end quote. Johnny is skeptical. Johnny says, quote, "I was through auditioning for producers and I wasn't at all interested in being remodeled into some kind of rock act," end quote. But that is not Rick Rubin's plan. That is not Rick Rubin's game. And Johnny quickly familiarizes himself with Rick Rubin's game. Johnny asks him, basically, "What are you gonna do that's any different from any of my other producers?" And according to Johnny, Rick says, quote, "I won't do anything. You'll do it.

• 42:51Speaker 04

  You'll come to my house and sit down in my living room and take a guitar and start singing. At some point, if you want me to, we'll turn on a recorder and you will try everything that you ever wanted to record, plus your own songs, plus new songs I might suggest that you think you could do a good job on. You'll sing every song you love, and somewhere in there we'll find a trigger song that will tell us we're heading in the right direction. I'm not very familiar with a lot of the music you love, but I want to hear it all." End quote. And for the next 10 years or so, spread out over the next six American Recordings albums,

• 43:34Speaker 04

  two posthumous, Johnny Cash sings it all.

• 43:42Speaker 05

  The beast in me

• 43:47Speaker 05

  is caged by frail and fragile bars.

• 43:54Speaker 04

  This song is called "The Beast in Me" by the god-tier singer and songwriter and producer Nick Lowe. My producer, Justin Sayles, will probably get mad at me if I don't tell you that Nick Lowe's version of "The Beast in Me," released in 1994, starts playing at the very end of the first episode of The Sopranos, when they're at a barbecue at Tony's house and the camera pans to the pool and the ducks are gone. I love Nick Lowe. Someday, I will contrive a way to talk to you at great length about how much I love Nick Lowe, but not now. Nick Lowe is English and debonair and mischievous, but he's not a terribly volatile or dangerous character. In my opinion, I don't picture him carrying a Bible or a gun.

• 44:36Speaker 04

  And so when he sings about the beast in me, you picture Nick like, I don't know, not saying bless you and somebody sneezes. Or maybe he sees an old lady crossing the street and he doesn't help. Maybe he's listening to Joe Rogan or something. Nothing serious. The beast in Nick Lowe and the beast in Johnny Cash are two different beasts. And no offense, but Johnny's beast could kick Nick's beast's ass. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm hearing.

• 45:07Speaker 05

  Restless by day and by night, rants and rages at the stars.

• 45:18Speaker 04

  Nick Lowe is married to Carleen Carter, June Carter's daughter and Johnny Cash's stepdaughter, Carleen Carter, for a little while. So there's a nice familial undercurrent here. Johnny Cash is about to sing the word God. Look out. Johnny Cash is about to put some freaking mustard on the word God. The bass rumble here, man. The sweet chariot swinging low. This man was born to sing the word God and God was born to hear it.

• 45:53Speaker 05

  God help the beast in me.

• 46:00Speaker 04

  And you'll notice that what we got here is Johnny Cash's voice and an acoustic guitar, and that's it. Everything else has been deemed unnecessary. And let's not oversimplify this, okay? Johnny Cash's American albums are not entirely ultra-stripped-down funereal voice and guitar affairs. These albums do not entirely consist of wild, audacious stunt covers of unexpected rock and roll hits. He's not waving goodbye the whole time. These albums are not entirely animated by the plain fact that Johnny's in his 60s and 70s now and his health is failing fast.

• 46:41Speaker 04

  His voice, his physical voice will audibly and heartbreakingly deteriorate as these albums progress. All of that stuff is happening some of the time. Yes. And the vibe is indeed often funereal and heartbreaking, but we are having fun here, honestly. So sure, for this first album, let's get Johnny Cash to sing songs by Nick Lowe and Danzig and Loudon Wainwright III and Tom Waits. And from there, let's get even wilder. Johnny Cash covering Beck and Soundgarden and Neil Diamond and Will Oldham and Nick Cave and The Beatles and The Eagles. Real quick, though, per that Robert Hilburn book, during their time together, Rick Rubin

• 47:26Speaker 04

  suggested at least two songs that Johnny didn't vibe with. The first one, My Way, Frank Sinatra. In the book, it says, quote, Cash wasn't a Sinatra fan, and he found the statement of personal independence grating, end quote. All right, forget it. But you know, the other song Rick Rubin tried to get Johnny Cash to sing? Holy crap.

• 48:05Speaker 04

  And he did it. There exists, in a bomb shelter somewhere, a recording of Johnny Cash singing Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love. Yes, the song with the super 80s video with the super chill models as Robert Palmer's backing band. Holy crap. In the book, it says, quote, though Cash good naturedly attempted a vocal, there was so much ridicule from Tom Petty and the others that Rubin quietly put the track on the shelf, end quote. Tom Petty starts hanging around, too. Holy crap. Who do I got a Venmo to hear Johnny Cash's version of Addicted to Love? I will Venmo Rick Rubin 75

• 48:51Speaker 04

  Right now, or PayPal, or Zelle, get at me. But yes, yes. Also, from the very beginning, Johnny Cash's American series has some genuinely blood chilling moments, a frailty, but also a bracing hardness that only Johnny can convey and only in his own words. I really dig a song on the first American album called Like a Soldier. I find it tremendously difficult to listen to, but I still dig it.

• 49:24Speaker 05

  There are nights I don't remember, and pain, it's been forgotten, and a lot of things I choose not to recall.

• 49:36Speaker 04

  This is a new Johnny Cash song, and this idea of pain so long gone, you've forgotten it, or you've chosen to forget it, you're trying to convince yourself you've forgotten it. I don't think you can fake that. I think you gotta be literally Johnny Cash to sell that. But let's not overstate this, okay? The balance here is so crucial musically and emotionally and philosophically, as the American series rumbles on. You don't ever want these records to get too maudlin, or too cute, or too stark, or too flamboyant, or too predictable, or too desperately unpredictable. The Rick Rubin Johnny Cash partnership is a triumph

• 50:16Speaker 04

  of atmosphere, and guile, and bravery, and also restraint. We are never overreaching, but we are building something. We are building toward something. We are expanding the great American songbook. We are expanding Johnny Cash's place within it. Robert Hilburn writes, quote, "No one, not even Sam Phillips, had understood the depth and range of Cash's artistry, or worked as hard at keeping Cash focused on his strengths as Rick Rubin. It was the equivalent of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro teaming on such landmark films as Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, where the director and actor seem

• 51:01Speaker 04

  Interlocked, end quote. And I think that's absolutely the right comparison, the right actor-director team, but maybe the wrong movie. De Niro in 1976 in Taxi Driver is way too young. What I'm hearing is Robert De Niro in 2019 in The Irishman, in a wheelchair, in a nursing home, asking the nurse to leave the door open.

• 51:28Speaker 05

  There are faces that come to me in my darkest secret memories, faces that I wish would not come back at all.

• 51:40Speaker 04

  But yeah, yes. Also, also, Johnny Cash covering Soundgarden.

• 51:49Speaker 05

  Too cold to start a fire, I'm burning diesel, burning dinosaur bones.

• 51:58Speaker 05

  I'll take the river down to Stillwater and ride a pack of dogs.

• 52:05Speaker 04

  Yes, please, absolutely. Johnny Cash covering Soundgarden's Rusty Cage on American 2, Unchained, released in 1996 and heavily featuring Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who serve as the backing band and provide addicted-to-love-related quality control. These records, it's never a matter of the grizzled old country lifer showing all these young rock stars who's boss, right? This is not Johnny Cash upstaging Soundgarden. There is a synergy, a kismet, a bridge built, a shared, expanded language. I hear Johnny Cash singing about burning dinosaur bones and riding a pack of dogs? And at first I

• 52:48Speaker 04

  think, that doesn't sound like him. And then in the next breath, I think, oh, sheesh, yes, of course it does. If any man alive has burned dinosaur bones for fuel, it's Johnny Cash. You get a similar spark, a similar blaze, a similar nuclear fusion when Johnny Cash and Nick Cave collide.

• 53:12Speaker 05

  I began to warm and chill to objects and their fuels, a ragged cup of twisted mott, the face of Jesus in my suit, those sinister dinner deals.

• 53:27Speaker 04

  Yes, please, absolutely. Johnny Cash covering "The Mercy Seat" by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on American Three's "Solitary Man", released in 2000. The torrent of wry and biblical and apocalyptic imagery pouring out of Johnny Cash's mouth. Or really, ultimately, it's just the name "Jesus", the way he sings the word "Jesus", the way he sings the word "Jesus" in a song somebody else wrote. The captivating dissonance between the rock star songwriter's conception of Jesus and Johnny Cash's conception of Jesus. The face of Jesus in Nick Cave's soup

• 54:10Speaker 04

  bears surprisingly little resemblance to the face of Jesus in Johnny Cash's soup. Or maybe Nick Cave's reaction to seeing Jesus's face in his soup differs dramatically from Johnny Cash's reaction to seeing Jesus's face in his soup. There's a captivating dissonance even when you assume there won't be. On American Three, Johnny Cash covers "One" by U2, arguably the single best U2 song, and among the most unabashedly spiritual U2 songs. Bono, like Johnny Cash, is a man of faith. These are two men with a lifelong interest in reconciling rock star hedonism with God-fearing devotion.

• 54:52Speaker 04

  And yet Johnny Cash, asking this question, feels different to me, less sarcastic or confrontational, maybe. In the Robert Hilburn book, he says simply enough that Bono wrote "One" to underscore the differences in people, whereas Johnny Cash heard "One" as a love song, and so that's the way he sings it.

• 55:14Speaker 05

  Have you come here to play Jesus?

• 55:19Speaker 05

  To the lepers in your head?

• 55:24Speaker 04

  And finally, there's Depeche Mode. There's Depeche Mode's Personal Jesus. There's Johnny Cash singing Personal Jesus, a song inspired in part by Johnny's old friend Elvis Presley. Depeche Mode's Martin Gore said he was reading the book Elvis and Me by Priscilla Presley, by Elvis's wife. In 1990, Martin Gore told Spin Magazine, quote, "It's a song about being a Jesus for somebody else, someone to give you hope and care. It's about how Elvis Presley was her man and her mentor, and how often that happens in love relationships, how everybody's heart is like a god in some way. And that's not a very balanced view of someone, is it?"

• 56:07Speaker 04

  End quote. So, the original Depeche Mode Personal Jesus is not sacrilegious, but it's less an act of praise than an interrogation of power dynamics. Lovers as false idols, specifically Elvis as a false idol. But Johnny Cash respectfully doesn't think of it that way, and he sure don't sing it that way.

• 56:30Speaker 05

  Your own personal Jesus.

• 56:38Speaker 05

  Someone to hear your prayers, someone who cares.

• 56:46Speaker 04

  No, talking about Personal Jesus, Johnny Cash once said, quote, "That's probably the most evangelical song I've ever recorded. I don't know that the writer ever meant it to be that, but that's what it is," end quote. And leave it to Johnny to put that as clearly and simply and powerfully as possible. If you ask Johnny Cash to sing a song, as long as it's not Sinatra, he'll sing the song, and he will sing the song with respect. He will have at least some idea of what the songwriter meant or didn't mean. But when Johnny Cash sings your song, that's what it is.

• 57:25Speaker 05

  I hurt myself today to see if I still feel.

• 57:37Speaker 04

  So what is this? What has this song become? The original Hurt is the last song on the Downward Spiral, the second full-length album from industrial rock gods, Nine Inch Nails, released in 1994. I say gods because I personally worshipped Nine Inch Nails as a sullen 90s alt-rock teenager. One could say that Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails singer and songwriter and overlord, Trent Reznor was my personal Jesus. Quite possibly, I have listened to the Downward Spiral in full more than any other album ever made by anyone ever. In any event, I have heard Trent Reznor sing Hurt many hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

• 58:19Speaker 04

  I saw Nine Inch Nails play in 1995 in Cleveland at a basketball arena at the CSU Convocation Center, and they played Hurt. And there was all this unsettling black-and-white video footage from the Hurt video on a giant screen behind the band. And I remember this snake, just this long, super-close-up shot of a snake staring everybody down, poised to strike. And the whole crowd cheered, and the chill that shot through me. You know? I wondered what kind of snake it was, and I found one post on forums.kingsnake.com in which a guy, I'm assuming it's a guy, but come on, a guy goes, quote, "I've always wondered what kind of snake it is in the Hurt video. My personal guess is either a mamba of some kind

• 59:04Speaker 04

  or a boomslang, some kind of old-world viper. Thoughts?" end quote. And nobody replied. I was so bummed that nobody had any thoughts. Oh, well, Trent Reznor once called Hurt "a valentine to the sufferer." He once called it "my most personal song." And so there is a profound discomfort for both the listener and the original songwriter here when Johnny Cash sings the words, "I hurt myself." Trent Reznor was 28 in early 1994 when the Downward Spiral came out. Johnny Cash was 70 in late 2002 when American 4: The Man Comes Around came out. We are dealing with entirely different experiences of pain,

• 59:48Speaker 04

  entirely different conceptions of self-harm. Never mind the details. All the detail you need is in the way Johnny sings the words, "the only thing that's real." Hell, it's in the way he sings the word "focus."

• 1:00:15Speaker 04

  In 2008, Talking to the Sun, Trent Reznor talks about hearing the Johnny Cash version of "Hurt" for the first time. He says, quote, "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," end quote. That was before Trent saw the video. Trent has also said that it's Johnny Cash's song now.

• 1:01:03Speaker 04

  That line potentially has a drastically different connotation now, but let's not get into it. It doesn't matter anymore. Johnny Cash is fading away. He is waving goodbye. He is leaving us. Not today, not tomorrow, but soon. Never mind the details. I guess they don't matter so much either anymore. The devastating contrast between Johnny Cash's voice on the first American Recordings album in 1994 and his much frailer, his palpably vanishing voice on the American Four album eight years later is almost unbearable. The contrast between his voice on American Four and his biblically commanding voice in the

• 1:01:42Speaker 04

  50s or 60s is completely unbearable. He sounds like a different person now. He is a different person now. He is someone else. We are still right here. He's a much quieter person, but if he keeps quiet, the stones along the road will praise him. Per the Robert Hillburn book, at this point, Rick Rubin and his collaborators are working very patiently with a gravely ill Johnny Cash, a frequently hospitalized Johnny Cash. They are working line by line and often word by word, stringing a full vocal take together by working around Johnny's exhaustion, his literal breathlessness. This is audible on "Hurt," even if "Hurt"

• 1:02:26Speaker 04

  sounds like he's singing the whole song in one shot.

• 1:02:32Speaker 04

  But yeah, there is before the Hurt video and there is after. I just watched it again and almost cried again. Having a normal one over here. The American Four, The Man Comes Around record comes out and critics dig it and it sells okay. And it's widely accepted that the Rick Rubin American Recordings project is a huge success and has redeemed Johnny Cash's years and really decades of stumbling and frustration. But the notion, even the theoretical argument that this might be Johnny Cash's greatest era, his crowning achievement, that's not a remotely plausible argument until the Hurt video. Directed by Mark Romainic.

• 1:03:13Speaker 04

  Filmed primarily at Johnny Cash's house in Hendersonville, Tennessee because he was too ill to travel anywhere else. Johnny's eyesight was failing. In the Robert Hillburn book, it says, quote, "Mark Romainic was saddened to see Cash surrounded by a massive wall of books he was no longer able to read." End quote. I put a big frowny face next to that quote. They wanted Johnny to sing while looking straight at the camera, but Johnny couldn't see the camera. Couldn't focus on it, so they put a little flashing light next to it and he focused on that. In this video, we see Johnny Cash in unflinching close up. We see Johnny Cash's hand tremble when he lifts the wine glass to pour it over the banquet table.

• 1:03:56Speaker 04

  That's the detail that obliterated me immediately. And it still does. We know. We know he's almost gone. He is almost too weak to even wave goodbye. But also, June Carter. June Carter appears halfway through the video on a staircase, looking at her husband with such concern, such love, such fear. And in the book, in the biography, it seems clear to everyone that Johnny will go first, that he will die first. But June, standing on that staircase, had learned the day before that she

• 1:04:41Speaker 04

  Had a leaky heart valve and she told friends that she had a premonition that if she went back to the hospital, she'd never leave. And let's not overdo this, but June is standing on this staircase, looking down at Johnny Cash. And as it turns out, June goes first. June Carter died on May 15th, 2003, of complications from heart surgery. She was 73. He told you.

• 1:05:09Speaker 05

  Everyone I know goes away in the end.

• 1:05:20Speaker 04

  This is tough. This is brutal. This video is brutal. Also, we try to avoid hyperbole around here. We renounce hyperbole in all his works, but Hurt is probably the single greatest music video ever made. I don't know if that's even a remotely incendiary opinion anymore. Certainly, it's the most devastating music video ever made and the tenderest also. The idea behind this video, in its crudest form, stark closeups of an ailing Johnny Cash interspersed with vintage footage of a young and strapping and terribly intimidating Johnny Cash, riding trains and commanding huge crowds and cavorting with June and radiating superstardom

• 1:06:05Speaker 04

  and immortality. In its crudest form, the Hurt video could be simply crude and exploitative and manipulative and gross and borderline abusive. And despite all the crying, I keep making myself re-watch the Hurt video to try and figure out why it doesn't strike me as crude and exploitative and gross. Per the book, when Rick Rubin first saw the Hurt video, he kind of freaked out. Freaking out Rick Rubin is nearly impossible. And when Johnny Cash first saw this video, he kind of freaked out. Johnny showed the video to people around him, June included, and they told him to say no, to bury it. Johnny took a long weekend to think about it.

• 1:06:45Speaker 04

  And Rick Rubin says, quote, "I remember sitting in my car in Santa Monica, looking at the ocean." While talking to Johnny, having a feeling that nobody's ever going to see this video. I thought for sure he was gonna say no, but he decided it should be seen. End quote. And we'll never know why exactly, but I really wanna know why exactly Johnny Cash thought it should be seen.

• 1:07:24Speaker 04

  I'll fly a starship across the universe divide. My best guess is that right here in the video's final 45 seconds or so, when the editing pace intensifies and we're racing back and forth between Johnny then and Johnny now, right here, we also get footage from The Gospel Road, that movie about the life of Jesus Christ that Johnny made in the 70s. We get footage of Jesus Christ being crucified, the pounding of the nails mirroring the pounding of the piano. And see, rock stars, 90s rock stars especially, had trained me to think of rock stars as horribly persecuted, as doomed, as suffering and even dying for us, dying for

• 1:08:05Speaker 04

  our sins, getting up on the cross for us. And maybe that's the way I initially read The Hurt video. I saw it as Johnny Cash equating himself with Jesus Christ. But I don't think that now. Now, I think that in his last days, with his crowning achievement video for one of his last great songs, Johnny wanted to remind us all what he believed in, what drove him, what he lived for, and perhaps why he was at peace with leaving us.

• 1:08:49Speaker 04

  Forget everything I told you earlier about when Johnny Cash died and how old he was and all that. I've forgotten all that. Because by another way of thinking, Johnny Cash will never die. He will never fade away, or wave goodbye, or flicker out on the landscape. Never. You hear me?

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  The Lemonade has spent decades keeping lemon on top and lime in the shadows. Their lemon agenda has infiltrated everything, even our music. That hit song named after the color of lemons? Not a coincidence. Big Lemon has been pulling strings in the industry for years. Think about it. But now, 7-Up is fighting back with their new Lime Lemon Soda. Now lime comes first. 7-Up, flip the sip.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change, your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time.

• 1:09:51Speaker 03

  Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.

• 1:09:58Speaker 04

  Our guest today, we are thrilled to welcome your favorite writer, and your second favorite writer's favorite writer. He is a senior staff writer at The Ringer. He is the author of the fantastic essay collection Impossible Owls. And he is the host of the fantastic Ringer podcast, Truthless, which publishes its season finale this week. It was on Tuesday. Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Phillips. Brian, welcome.

• 1:10:23Speaker 06

  Rob, we've been talking about doing this for a long time. I've made no secret to you of the fact that I love your show. I thought going on 60 songs is gonna be the most fun experience I could have in the podcast space. And it's for that, those reasons of fun, that I'm so delighted to be here to talk about Chex's notes, Johnny Cash is Hurt.

• 1:10:50Speaker 04

  I will say you brought this on yourself. We did talk broadly about what would interest you and you zeroed in on Johnny Cash and it is, this is not a lighthearted conversation, Brian. This is, we're gonna have no fun whatsoever and I want to-

• 1:11:04Speaker 06

  I, I am my own worst enemy, Rob.

• 1:11:07Speaker 04

  Yikes. Um, Brian, when I say the name Johnny Cash to you, what's the first song, the first era, the first iteration of Johnny Cash that you think of? How do we start this?

• 1:11:20Speaker 06

  I think when I hear the words Johnny Cash, what first pops into my head is an image and I think it's the famous photograph of him flipping the bird at the camera in 1969 at San Quentin. You know, I just think like that, that picture just summarizes so much and kind of captures so much. And it's just a weird kind of transitional moment for him anyway. Um, I don't know. I'm, I'm fascinated by that, that, that whole concert. Um, so I think that's what it is.

• 1:11:52Speaker 04

  In the early 2000s, like when I think of Eminem, I've seen like 50,000 pictures of Eminem flipping off the camera. Like that's just his thing that he does reflexively. And it's like, there's something about the power of Johnny Cash doing that once, that is so much greater than Eminem doing it 50,000 times. You know what I mean? Like, I think there's just, there's a divide right there that interests me.

• 1:12:18Speaker 06

  Absolutely. Johnny Cash is always the boss. You know, he's not like a little punk doing donuts in the parking lot. Like Johnny Cash, like when Johnny Cash talks, your chest cavity vibrates. Johnny Cash is this like, just this sort of like patriarch of patriarchs. So when he's like flipping off the warden of a jail, it really, really rattles everything.

• 1:12:44Speaker 04

  Is this a voice from your childhood? Is this music that you heard growing up?

• 1:12:50Speaker 06

  Yeah. You know, I discovered Johnny Cash twice, I think, like when I was a kid. Uh, I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, in a small town in Oklahoma in the eighties, early eighties. Like Johnny Cash was obviously a presence and I remember like hearing Johnny Cash records at my best friend's house. You know, his, his parents would put them on. I knew who he was. I had this, I kind of associated him. I thought he was like best friends with Kenny Rogers, like, you know, we, we were in the kind of Kenny Rogers, like the Gambler era. And I thought Kenny Rogers was just unbelievably cool, which is not wrong. Uh, so I, yeah, I, I've, I've carried this picture of just kind of like the, the like peak kind of man in black.

• 1:13:34Speaker 06

  Like Johnny Cash is like the ultimate kind of like 52 year old granddad. Like he's, he's, he's still kind of hail and hearty, but he's just the patriarch of the whole thing. Like that picture I've always had in my head. And then I discovered Johnny Cash a second time as a, as a grown up, like, like my first year after college. I was working at this magazine and a guy I worked with like figured out that I was into indie rock. And he was like, well, do you listen to Johnny Cash? And I was like, well, not really. And he loaned me those, like, you remember the, like, uh, the Love God Murder compilations?

• 1:14:12Speaker 04

  Oh yeah. The three with the Quentin Tarantino and Bono liner notes.

• 1:14:16Speaker 06

  Exactly. So he came, he brought me like Love God and Murder and was like, you gotta check these out. If you love like Wilco, I don't even remember what else we were talking about, but.

• 1:14:26Speaker 04

  Like that's not untrue.

• 1:14:28Speaker 06

  If you're into Neutral Milk Hotel, you, you gotta, you gotta discover Johnny Cash.

• 1:14:33Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:14:34Speaker 06

  So yeah, I feel like he's been following me around in like one incarnation or another my whole life.

• 1:14:40Speaker 04

  Okay. If I remember correctly, Johnny Cash also recorded a version of The Gambler. But he couldn't quite nail it. And then he was really angry when Kenny Rogers' version blew up. And he was mad at whichever producer made him record it. Like there, there is a universe in which The Gambler is a Johnny Cash song. And I can't decide if I want to live in that universe or not.

• 1:15:06Speaker 06

  Like the hard thing for me is imagining that Johnny Cash could ever fuck up The Gambler. Like that just seems like, that just seems like Print the Money. Like I want to hear those tapes.

• 1:15:19Speaker 04

  No, I want to hear those tapes too, but like ostensibly, this is the era, like the whole narrative of the American series is that Johnny Cash sends, spends like the whole eighties, you know, maybe even part of the seventies, like at sea, right? Like it's just the albums, you know, the singles, you know, he's struggling with pills, you know, it's, it's, it might be over, you know, and suddenly Rick Rubin shows up at a concert of his and just rescues him. Like, is it overstating it? You know, is it over mythologizing it to say that the American series like completely reframed how we see and hear Johnny Cash, like even now?

• 1:16:01Speaker 02

  I definitely think the American series reframed how we saw Johnny Cash in 1994. Like, I guess, I guess I have kind of a short term and a long term answer to the question. Like, long term, I think he was probably going to be fine because he was, he, he had already recorded a pretty immortal body of work, you know, but by 2024, like we would, we would have sort of forgotten like the wayward, bloated, tipsy, um, Branson era Johnny Cash and would just be listening to Walk the Line and, um, you know, the, the, the classics. Um, but definitely in 1994, it, it reframed everything and, and just really kind of established him at the center of a conversation that he hadn't even been

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  kind of in the building for, before. Um, and so I think that's, I think that's what it, what it did. Like, I also think that, like, there's an interesting question, like, did the American series kind of help reframe like how we think about aging country stars overall? Like, like, does Willie Nelson have the same place in culture that he's had for the last, like,

• 1:17:09Speaker 06

  decade, 15 years, if not for we us already having this muscle memory of kind of putting Johnny Cash in that spot. You know what I mean?

• 1:17:19Speaker 04

  That's an interesting question. I think it's definitely true. You know, I Willie Nelson is like the Snoop Dogg of country to me. Like, that's not just a superficial, like marijuana thing. There's like, like a cuddly mascot, but also like an absolute badass. Like Willie Nelson feels very distinct to me, but I just the notion of Johnny Cash and Justin Timberlake competing for an MTV Video Music Award in 2002 and like Justin Timberlake having to, you know, convey, you know, how sorry he is that he won, like just the notion of putting Johnny Cash in the present tense conversation, like with the youth in any sense, like I, I think, you know, I think about like Tom Petty

• 1:18:04Speaker 04

  being rehabilitate, not rehabilitated, but like the second wind he got via MTV, right? You know, and suddenly the kids are into Tom Petty again, but this feels very different to me. And no, I think you're absolutely right that there's like an overall way that we looked at our heroes after this, and we sort of saw everybody as potentially a reclamation project, right? Like Tony Bennett doing unplugged, like that was, that was, I think, late 90s, like that's in the midst of the American thing, but just the idea that you can take these old guys, you know, who your parents were really into and like make them cool again. Superficially, I think Johnny Cash has a lot to do with why we still sort of think that way now.

• 1:18:45Speaker 06

  We were very glib for a long time, and I mean, this is how stardom works, obviously, but we were very glib about just kind of like throwing these guys on the trash heap when they'd outlived their usefulness. And I feel like this was kind of a moment where a lot of people paused and went, wait a second, like, maybe we shouldn't throw them, you know, throw like iconic legends who with, with decade long catalogs of brilliant work, like maybe we shouldn't dismiss them out of hand.

• 1:19:12Speaker 04

  Right, we're pulling the ice floe back on.

• 1:19:15Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 1:19:16Speaker 04

  It's like, never mind. Sorry. Never mind. You mentioned Branson, Missouri, which is like, I've never been there and I hope to never go there, quite frankly.

• 1:19:23Speaker 06

  Oh, never go there.

• 1:19:24Speaker 04

  It's like a tourist trap. Okay, it's like a tourist trap sort of thing where like Johnny Cash was supposed to play a residency, you know, and he's playing to just, you know, busloads of old people who don't care about him at all. And it's like the worst sort of retirement situation. And suddenly he's at the Viper Room in LA, you know, like playing, you know, for whatever, for Johnny Depp or whatever. Like, he's, he's playing these American songs. Like, it's just, it's so wild to think about the duality of Johnny Cash in that sense. Like, you said to me, like, you know, he, he's this wild counterculture figure, you know, but he, he met Nixon. He played for President Nixon. Like, he married into the Carter family, but he's like a foundational outlaw. He's a pop star, but he made a lot of gospel music.

• 1:20:08Speaker 04

  Like, you said he was John Wayne and Woody Guthrie. Like, how does one person manage to be everything to everyone like this?

• 1:20:17Speaker 06

  I mean, that's the, that's the big Johnny Cash question to me. And I think about it a lot. I think, I think that, you know, every icon becomes iconic partly because they unite contradictions, right? But I don't know that anybody did it like Johnny Cash. I mean, you know, Madonna is like, she's like sexy, but she's also Catholic. But you can usually kind of point to like, which half of the dichotomy is like a little bit cosplay, you know, like Madonna being a devout Catholic is a little bit cosplay. Like, there's no cosplay in any of Johnny Cash's dualities. And I just think that, like, I think he was

• 1:20:58Speaker 06

  attracted to edges. I think he was drawn to edges. I think most of us, we kind of look at our personalities and whenever we sense that there's a contradiction or there's something we can't quite explain, we kind of back away from it, right? Like, we want to make sense to ourselves. But I think Johnny Cash was one of those artists who kind of see the contradiction and think like, that's what's interesting. That's the real me. Let's, like, you know, he walked the line. Like, he was not like, he wasn't. Walking like safely 40 feet back from the line, he was walking the line itself.

• 1:21:33Speaker 04

  There we go. That's not as good a song title.

• 1:21:35Speaker 06

  Those people, yeah, exactly. Like, I walk near the line. Um, you know, he, he, he just, he was everything he was. And most of us, most of us are never quite everything we are. Um, and that what, I don't know. He's, I could, I could prattle on about this, but like, I'm, I'm fascinated by the way any, any kind of category you put him in. He both seems to completely embody the category and to completely destroy the category at the same time. Like he, like, we, we were talking about this before and I said something like, um, it's like he trashes hotel rooms.

• 1:22:16Speaker 06

  And every time he trashes a hotel room, he gets a hundred thousand Hilton rewards points. Like, he just seems to keep being like.

• 1:22:23Speaker 04

  Thank you, Johnny. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Cash. Yes. It looks better now. You've redecorated. It's, it's perfect. Yes.

• 1:22:31Speaker 06

  As you say, like, he's the most Nashville establishment artist in the history of Nashville. He, he's, he's married to Mother Maybel Carter's daughter, right? Like, he's married to June Carter. He's, he's the, the, the, you know, he's doing a TV show from the Ryman Auditorium every, every week. Like, he is Nashville. But like Waylon Jennings is obsessed with him. Willie Nelson is obsessed with him. Kris Kristofferson owes his career to him. Like, um, you just kind of, you can't, you can't pin him down, even in terms of not being able to pin him down. I don't know. He's, I'm, I'm not making sense, but for someone so like solid, cause he really does seem like a, like a slab of granite. Right? Like as a, as a guy, he's very slippery.

• 1:23:17Speaker 04

  Right, right. Okay, so it's 1994, right? It is like the peak of grunge, alternative music. The, it's easy to reduce the American series to like, you know, what Rick Rubin did is just put Johnny Cash alone in a room with a guitar, like just strip everything down. Like, that's a lot of what's happening, but that's not all of what's happening. That's not all of why the American series works as well as it does. Like, how would you articulate what Rick Rubin does here?

• 1:23:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that, um, like, first of all, I wake up in terror every day thinking about like the next kind of collaboration between like a younger producer and an older established icon that is going to come down the pike. Like, every day I wake up thinking, my god, Jack Antonoff is going to make a Mary Ann Faithfull album, and I'm not.

• 1:24:13Speaker 04

  I was gonna ask you what you were, that's terrifying. I wish you hadn't said that out loud, yeah.

• 1:24:21Speaker 06

  The difference is, I think that Rick Rubin still truly saw Johnny Cash as a great artist and believed he was a great artist. And, and Johnny Cash was driving the train. You know, I do not think that was just Rick Rubin driving, driving the train and Johnny Cash kind of showing up in bewilderment, being like, you know, help me navigate the maze of contemporary pop stardom and make me relevant again. I think it was like Johnny Cash still has something to say. Rick Rubin knew it, Johnny Cash knew it, and they found a way to say it in terms that 1994 could take seriously. You know, at the time, the language was all kind of like,

• 1:25:03Speaker 06

  you know, they stripped away all the like Nashville doodads and nonsense and just got down to like the true essence of the music. I mean, I think you could argue that like an MTV Unplugged set is in its own way, like just is kind of corny and historically conditioned as, as Nashville back in choir. I mean, give me the Jordanaires at my funeral. But, but it was, you know, it was important in that moment to kind of like put him in front of 1994 in a way that like we, the like snobbish, like rock teens. Of 94 would would buy and that's and that's what Rick Rubin did like it seems to me

• 1:25:45Speaker 06

  that it was more than about kind of like redeeming Johnny Cash from all of the excess of his past productions. It was more just like here is a historical framing that makes sense for you right now. And and it was it was brilliant.

• 1:25:59Speaker 04

  No, I like the simplicity of that, that it's it doesn't work if Rick Rubin is like, I am going to save Johnny Cash. I am going to make you cool for the kids again. It is Rick Rubin knowing that Johnny Cash is already the coolest person who ever lived and you are going to show everybody. You know, you're not incepting a new thing into Johnny Cash. You are showing people what Johnny Cash is capable of.

• 1:26:23Speaker 06

  The idea that you and I in high school would be like Johnny Cash needs to prove that he's as cool as we are.

• 1:26:32Speaker 04

  He's no, yeah, he's no Eddie Vedder. He's no Jeff Buckley. Come on. This is it's I don't know. I don't know if I like the cut of this guy's jib, you know?

• 1:26:42Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 1:26:43Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:26:44Speaker 06

  I gotta dodge neon, man.

• 1:26:49Speaker 04

  I I wanted to ask you about the song The Man Comes Around, which I sort of meant to get to in my thing and then did it. It's on American four, the same album as Hertz. And this is an original, like this is one of the last Johnny Cash originals. And like the books I've read make clear that like this song meant an enormous like this song was very, very important to him. Like he saw this, I don't think it's his last, you know, hopefully, but like his crowning achievement, like this is the best thing I've ever written. And like the imagery of this song, like the virgins are all trimming their wicks, the whirlwind is in the thorn trees. Like this really is a tremendous song. And I don't, do you think that this song gets enough credit, you know, and that it deserves some of the

• 1:27:32Speaker 04

  love and attention that like Hurt and the other covers get?

• 1:27:37Speaker 06

  It is such a fascinating song. I mean, it's it's um, I always think of The Man Comes Around as kind of like the weird twin of Red Right Hand that that Nick Cave song, um, uh, you know, Red Right Hand is kind of about like the devil going around like fucking everything up for people and The Man Comes Around is about God going around and fucking everything up for people.

• 1:28:01Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:28:03Speaker 06

  Basically, there should, there should be like a really nice version of Peaky Blinders, that that's the theme song too.

• 1:28:11Speaker 06

  I don't know, like I, yeah, The Man Comes Around, it's obviously part of this kind of like long tradition of, um, end times country songs where we sort of imagine the apocalypse and the writer sort of tries to out Revelations, the Book of Revelations, and we get these crazy virgins trimming their wicks imagery. Um, to, to me, I don't know if I think The Man Comes Around is completely successful. Like, I think about half of it is, is pretty brilliant. And then there are bits that sound a little bit like a Vampire Weekend song to me, like, um, the line, I have the lyrics open right here.

• 1:28:49Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:28:50Speaker 06

  Till Armageddon, no shalom, no shalom, then the father hen will call his chickens home. That just, that's, I can just imagine that with like a steel drum.

• 1:29:01Speaker 04

  Helps.

• 1:29:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:29:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's, I, I know what you're saying. I think his delivery certainly helps, but there is, I had not considered Vampire Weekend, but.

• 1:29:12Speaker 06

  His charisma, like his gravitas does really put the song over. And there are moments like when he's singing about a hundred million angels singing or whatever that just like, take your spine out of your body for a few minutes. Um, I don't know if that's the song I would, I would have singled out as his crowning achievement, um, if I, if I were, if I were him, but, um, it's every, everyone should listen to it. It's, I mean, what do, what do you think, Rob? Do you love that song?

• 1:29:43Speaker 04

  I, it's not that I passed over it, but I definitely, when I started reading about how important it was to him, I was like, oh, you know, I, I don't think listening to it, I would have thought like, this is it. Like, this is the central thesis and like the single song that this entire. Has been building toward like, I really do love his originals interspersed within the covers like I think partly because of hurt. I think it's easy to assume if you don't know a lot about it that like the American series is entirely stunt covers, you know, and just like surprising things. And there's a lot of that, obviously, but there is a core like even toward the end, there is a core of like him and like him and him in real time, him now,

• 1:30:25Speaker 04

  you know, that I think is really vital. So I don't think I would have flagged this as like the one, but it really deepened the song for me to know that that's the way he saw it, you know? It is a, it is a like, just such a cool and kind of overlooked tradition, these sort of like country songs that are like adding pages to the Bible, you know, I think about, um, I think about like Great Speckled Bird all the time, which is that's an older song, but it's like made famous by Roy Acuff. And it's just this like, really bizarre image of this like giant spotted bird like that. I don't know if I know what it represents, but, um, it feels so, so like, just kind of like odd and out of place among like all the kind

• 1:31:08Speaker 04

  of honky tonk ballads. Um, there should be a, we should do a compilation of like country Bible songs. Neo neo revelations songs. Uh, we should probably talk about hurt eventually. Uh,

• 1:31:24Speaker 04

  does it surprise you? Or is it not really at all surprising that hurt as has emerged as like the singular, you know, achievement, certainly of the American series, but even like it's, if I'm not mistaken, it's the most streamed Johnny Cash song now, you know, and there's a lot of recency bias. There's a lot of lot built into that, but like, is it at all surprising that this song has emerged as like one of the Johnny Cash songs stretching over his whole career?

• 1:31:54Speaker 06

  It's obviously, it's, it's, um, it's a little surprising that a Trent Reznor song is so, is so, so associated with Johnny Cash now. But I don't know, I kind of think that the, the way the whole American series went,

• 1:32:10Speaker 06

  it could have been a lot of different songs. And this is just sort of the one where everything, everything came together. You know, the, the video, the video being so brilliant, um, really did a lot.

• 1:32:23Speaker 06

  Um, I think, I, I don't, I want to be clear. I do not think this song is a gimmick. I do not think it's just a stunt cover. I think it goes much, much deeper than that. But I think that it had very immediate and obvious gimmick appeal at the moment when it came out. Maybe in a way that even went a little bit beyond Johnny Cash singing Personal Jesus, or Johnny Cash singing, you know, any of the other songs on the American series. So it was something that you, you know, I remember when it came out and I was like, oh, I want to hear that. Like, I was kind of like rubbernecking. Like, I was, I thought I was going to be kind of driving by, driving by the car crash, as much as I love Johnny Cash.

• 1:33:05Speaker 06

  And then it's, and then it's so good. I, I just feel like a lot of, a lot of things that were really close in other American recording songs just clicked with Hurt. And, um,

• 1:33:17Speaker 06

  do you remember, you probably talked about this in the episode, but do you remember the first time you saw that video?

• 1:33:23Speaker 04

  Not exactly, not exactly. I'm trying, I don't know if it was on MTV. It must have been. I mean, I don't think it was, it couldn't have been on the internet yet. So no, I, of all the videos that I have a distinct memory of like where I was and everything, I don't have that. What I have is just a sense memory of being obliterated immediately. Like, I have the same memory, I assume everyone has, where it's just, you're flattened by the end of it. Like, it's just, it's so beautiful and so devastating. Like, I remember that feeling, but I don't remember the circumstances around it.

• 1:33:58Speaker 06

  I also think, like, for, for me, I, I didn't know what he looked like at the, at that point in his life. You know, I was, when I pictured Johnny Cash, I'm still picturing a guy with like black hair, big, strong guy. And just to see him with that ravaged face with white hair, you know, I think he's in a wheelchair. I don't think you see the wheelchair, but I think he was in a wheelchair at that point in his life.

• 1:34:22Speaker 05

  It it just it just felt like shocking, shocking. And then to have that feeling of shock folded into this kind of Renaissance oil painting of a of a video that's like putting you in touch with this like timeless conversation about life and death and, you know, the the the other thing that hurt has going for it is that the lyrics bizarrely fit his life so perfectly. I mean, you know, like the the he lived that song more than Trent Reznor ever did, I would I would argue.

• 1:35:00Speaker 05

  So it really felt like it was coming. It was it was a stunt cover that was kind of coming from this kind of like Fisher a thousand miles inside him. And it was, yeah, it was amazing.

• 1:35:12Speaker 04

  Even like I wear this crown of shit becoming I wear this crown of thorns. Like, I'm sure I remember as like an early twenties being like, ah, you won't say shit. Like, ah, but like, just that divide, just the way one word change like changes the entire meaning of the song, just reframes the song. Like, it's it's just a striking thing to me now, how effective even that one moment is.

• 1:35:38Speaker 05

  It it takes it from being a slightly whiny young man's song of self pity to this incredibly dignified old man's song of like looking back on his life. I mean, the the the shit to thorns moment is the obvious change. But to me, um, the the switch in meaning of the line, everyone I know goes away in the end, is is just what tears my heart out. Because when when Trent Reznor sings that, that means like, you know, I have complicated relationships and I can't rely on my friends to stay with me or like my parents got divorced or whatever. When Johnny Cash sings it, it means everybody I know is dying.

• 1:36:22Speaker 05

  And, um, yeah, and and, you know, June dies very soon after that song is recorded and and he didn't, I mean, he only lives for

• 1:36:32Speaker 06

  Another few months, right?

• 1:36:35Speaker 04

  Well, you said dignified, like the video is dignified, and I agree with that. And I think that that's astounding that it is dignified. I just, I think there's a version of this video that's just trauma porn, right? Like you just stick the camera in his face and it's just so exploitative and gross. And I just, I keep watching this video and trying to figure out like how it conveys so clearly, you know, this devastation, you know, and that he's at the end of his life, but still it convert, it confer such dignity to him. Like I want to know how it manages this trick of, of just being so emotional without being emotionally manipulative, I guess.

• 1:37:21Speaker 06

  You're, you're absolutely right. There is a version of this video that is the equivalent of like those direct to DVD, like Bruce Willis movies where he doesn't know where he is and they're reading his dialogue.

• 1:37:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:37:34Speaker 06

  He's repeating it and yes, exactly. And it's not that, it's not that at all. I think, I think it's, it's kind of the same thing we were talking about before. I think the secret is that he knew what they were doing. I think that he was, he, he was making this, you know? It wasn't like, it wasn't like he was just showing up and being told what to do. They, they filmed that at his house, right? Like that's his stuff. I, I think that, I think that it was, the message was his message. The, the, the, the feelings were his feelings. He wasn't just kind of a chess piece that some kind of corporate producers were, were moving around and exploiting.

• 1:38:16Speaker 06

  It really felt intentional and authentic to use two awful internet words, but, um, but it really does. It really, it really feels like this is, this is his art and everyone else, you know, Mark Romanek is helping him make it and Rick Rubin is helping him make it. But they're not making it.

• 1:38:36Speaker 04

  Just to wrap up, I, I think about a young person now getting into Johnny Cash and almost, and doing him in reverse, right? Like so much of the power of the Hurt video is that, you know, even we're too young to really have been around for his heyday, but like we know what Johnny Cash was, you know, and now we're seeing it at the end. Whereas I do think that if somebody, you know, like if you type in Johnny Cash into Spotify now, like Hurt is one of the first songs to come up. The Hurt video is one of the things, you know, he's most associated with in like the past 20, 25 years at least. Like you almost go from the end back to the beginning. And I just, I wonder what you think about how a new convert

• 1:39:18Speaker 04

  to Johnny Cash, like how it's going to change your perception of him when you're almost running the timeline in reverse.

• 1:39:25Speaker 06

  It's a great question. I mean, I think, I think that the like, the underlying, the underlying point, like the, the thought I have that underlies the whole issue is that there are a lot of icons of Johnny Cash's stature who are, who are just barely remembered at all. You know, like young, young people are not discovering Bing Crosby, right? Like, um, if, um, I think like Nat, you know, Nat King Cole is much, much more than chestnuts roasting on an open fire. But if, if the Christmas song like helps some young person discover like Nat King Cole, then fine. Like I have no, I have no complaints there. Um,

• 1:40:06Speaker 06

  so if, if like people are searching for Johnny Cash at all, that feels to me like a win for the human soul. I'm, I'm all for it. But it does, it does feel, it does feel, um, disorienting to imagine, right? Because for us, like, we knew something about who he was and his life story. And then we got to Hurt and it was like a comment on all that stuff.

• 1:40:31Speaker 04

  Right. It was, it was, um, it was, it accrued extra power and extra meaning because of everything we knew about him. So if you're going backwards, what, what, what happens? I don't, I don't know. Um, you know, maybe, maybe you've, you've just listened to the, the rest of the American recordings. I mean, I, I think, I think there are songs in that series that are as powerful as Hurt. I mean, for me, the, the Beast in Me is, um, knocks me, knocks me over. I mean, that's that, that great, um, Nick Lowe song. And his version of, I mean, the Nick Lowe version of that song also fells me, but the Johnny Cash

• 1:41:10Speaker 04

  version, again, it's somebody else's words, perfectly expressing his life. Um, unreal. If they, if they bounce to that and then, and then start going backwards, I, I think it, I think it all probably works out in the end.

• 1:41:26Speaker 04

  I think you're right. I think that's the optimistic way to look at it. And why don't we end there, just on a slightly optimistic, no, that was pretty fun. That was pretty fun, given circumstances, I think. It was pretty fun, given the circumstance that we are all going to die and everyone we love will also die. Well, it's been great having you, Brian. A cold cup of coffee from Brian Phillips, host of Truthless, the show about liars. Yes. That's beautiful. Thank you so much for coming, Brian. Thank you, Rob.

• 1:42:09Speaker 04

  Thanks very much to our guest this week, Brian Phillips. Thanks as always to our producers, Justin Sayles and Jonathan Kerma. Thanks to Olivia Creary for additional production help. Thanks to Juliana Ress for fact checking, and thank you very much for listening. And now, let's all go listen to Hurt by Johnny Cash. It's gonna be okay. We'll see you in a little while.

• 1:42:58Speaker 05

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