Walking Trent's Line

I am late bloomer when it comes to Nine Inch Nails. I remember in high school a few friends really loving this band - starting back in the Head Like a Hole days, and even more so after the release of The Downward Spiral.
At the time I wasn't into the industrial sound, it has only been in the past three or four years that I have truly began to love this type of music and appreciate the brilliance of Trent Reznor. I suppose, that like most of musical reportoire, it was a live album that sucked me in. Live: And All That Could Have Been was an album I downloaded from Napster and fell in love with immediately. It seemed to fit with my life at that time - with the heavy sounds becoming the perfect backdrop to the gloomy dark days of life in London and my daily walk through Soho.

I caught NIN live at the Brixton Academy in the months before I left London. It was a kick ass show (that is the most apt way to describe it). It is all power and all passion. A highlight from that night was Hurt - probably my favourite NIN song - and probably the slowest.

I watched Walk The Line, the Johnny Cash bio-pic, the other day and it reminded me of a great version of Hurt which he recorded, short before his death. The film clip below is the last one Cash ever created, and it seems fitting that it was for this song - given the challenges he overcame in his life.

It is one of my favourite covers - you can see that the song really means something to Cash - you can hear it in his voice.