(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Fri 21 November 2025 17:51, UK
Nothing that Rick Rubin touched was simply about getting the best take whenever he was behind the mixing desk.
He wanted to work with every one of his artists on a more intimate level, and no amount of blood, sweat and tears was going to matter if the actual songs didn’t work. While there needed to be some X-factor in the mix whenever he worked on a record, some of the best musical minds could get the job done with only their voice and a few microphones.
Then again, that’s what it was all about for Rubin when he first started making music. Some of the biggest names to him at the time were punk rockers, and when listening to the greatest songs that Ramones ever put out, it was clear that they were working from the same format that he was when he was putting together his first beats at Def Jam Records. It was all about simplicity, and as long as there was someone speaking truth on it, that was all that mattered to him.
But “truth” could be from multiple perspectives as well. Although punk and hip-hop may get the credit of being two of the purest genres imaginable, Rubin knew that there was power in someone bringing that same energy to rock and roll as well. It’s what made him curious when working with Run-DMC and Aerosmith, and when he started to see what Tom Petty could do on his own, he realised that he had the power to appreciate an album like Full Moon Fever just as much as Slayer’s Reign in Blood.
Out of all the collaborations that he’s done, though, there’s something about Johnny Cash that felt different. Rubin seemed to be a surrogate translator for Cash whenever he was showing ‘The Man in Black’ any new music, and judging by the way that Cash conducted himself around the musical guru, it’s not like he wasn’t afraid of trying some new things whenever he sang songs like Soundgarden’s ‘Rusty Cage’ or Nine Inch Nails’s ‘Hurt’.
While no one could have predicted that Cash would depart from this Earth at the time that he did, Rubin could only remember the profound impact that the legend had on his life, saying, “He enriched my life tremendously — he was such a beautiful person. I went to his funeral and two different people said something I’d never thought about before but really struck home as true. They said that he’s not important because he’s such a great singer, or because he’s such a great songwriter and such a great musician, but he’s important because he was such a great man. We’re lucky he chose music, but anything he’d done would have been just as great.”
And all of us should be counting our blessings that he chose music over anything else. He was already considered a relic of the previous country boom, but looking at the amount that he made towards the end of his life, ‘Hurt’ couldn’t have been a more fitting epitaph for what his music meant to so many people.
Sure, it wasn’t his own song, and he may have only needed to change one lyric for it to work in his range, but whereas Trent Reznor sang the song with such vulnerability, Cash’s version is the sound of a man taking inventory after a lifetime of mistakes and pleading with both God, his family and himself that he deserved to die a happy man rather than meet his maker with his head hung low.
Not everyone might be in love with what Cash stood for, but that song alone is hard for anyone to truly deny. There are many artists that try to keep their music as “real” as possible, but the ones that truly respect the craft of making songs knew that Cash didn’t have a dishonest bone in his body towards the end of his life.
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