“I hurt myself today
to see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
the only thing that’s real
the needle tears a hole
the old familiar sting
try to kill it all away
but I remember everything”

In an interview with Alternative Press, Reznor admitted that when Rubin first asked if Cash could cover his song, he was “flattered” but worried that “the idea sounded a bit gimmicky.” The power of Cash’s song didn’t fully hit Reznor until he saw 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. [1]

Reznor still occasionally refers to “Hurt” as “a song that isn’t mine anymore.”

You need to see the Johnny Cash – Hurt video. Trent Reznor and Zach De LaRocha both like got emtoional when they saw the first screening of it.