I'll start with the Immortal Johnny Cash's cover. This was the version which I heard first and till yesterday I thought it was original(my friend failing to mention NiN's version is the original). Coming back to Cash's rendition, the way it starts is just decisive!! How the opening notes and the way they are played shreds your soul into many discomfiting fragments of wastage. One soul who at the fag end of his life realises that all his accomplishments mounted to nothing, as his life is incomplete without his loved ones who are all now forever gone. With no shoulder to cry on, no one to console and absolutely no one to make him laugh all that is left now is memory. Memory which with each passing day is turning into a misery. The crest of this song to me would be the way its flowing evenly and with very simple chords and notes how Johnny Cash has described the most sublime complexity of life!!!
Coming to Nine Inch Nail's Version. this song is morose and it highlights the insipid meandering of life especially when you earn your bread doing something you love... how at times you feel life is too shallow and feel there is not the same love and feeling that drew you towards your passion in the first place.It resonates the droopy nature and loneliness of stardom. How after being successful you become suspicious and world becomes precarious. How folks around you are judged by you as you've lost the thing called trust... and even in a gathering you feel you are all alone. How standing in the bright spotlight you realise you are not what you were in the beginning .. how your motives have completely changed. How as a kid all you ever wanted to do was a write a lovely song and how you were busy searching for that song. You wonder how it has drifted from love and changed into the sad aspect of commerce. How you just aim and hope that this album be better than the one before.. How you have been deprived the wings of creativity and are dictated by record labels to produce stuff which makes big buck!!Though both describe the shallow aspects of life and how hollow it is and the way it looses its meaning if you fail to find your near and dear ones right beside you.Johnny Cash's version is a parting gift to the world.... a eulogy to himself. While Trent Reznor's version is a mocking question to himself as to where is the love and how he has to check his priority list every time he wakes up and live by it.There is no doubt that Cash's version is better with even Trent accepting it but we cannot discount the genius of Trent , for the success of Cash's version lies primarily on the fact that Cash utilized and adhered to all the compositional attributes, lyrics of Trent.
Cash on the other hand has to be credited for the definitive tone of finality in his song. While Trent aimed for that unknown unexplainable numb pain, Cash chose the silencing sorrow of life. Cash being and icon of bygone era and a genre altogether different worked his Midas touch on an already golden song which was abstract song and brought to it the marrow of life and turned it into diamond. Trent just spoke of his pain which no one can see in his stardom and how even after living the dream he is all alone. Both of these versions are equally appealing to me and I am just lucky to have lived in the time to see these two Maestros!!!
