In 2002, Johnny Cash recorded what turned out to become one of his legacy-defining songs. It was unlikely to happen at that point in his life. Cash was seventy years old by then, nearly a decade into a creative revival in a career that saw him go from a superstar and icon to being dropped from his label and playing county fairs, before an improbable rebound back into the zeitgeist with his stripped-down 1994 album, American Recordings. The Man in Black was already a legend at that point—“Folsom Prison Blues,” “I Walk the Line,” and “Ring of Fire” were already firmly established in the cultural canon—but he added a signature song to his catalog with an unlikely cover of the Nine Inch Nails song “Hurt.”
Trent Reznor, who wrote the song, reflected in 2004 on the experience of hearing it for the first time. “That song isn’t mine anymore,” he acknowledged. “I wrote some words and music in my bedroom as a way of staying sane, about a bleak and desperate place I was in . . . that winds up reinterpreted by a music legend from a radically different era and genre, and still retains sincerity and meaning—different, but every bit as pure.”
“Hurt” was a perfect song for Johnny Cash, a tortured declaration of pain and purpose sung by a man as famous for his demons as his talent. Listeners responded to the gravity in his voice, and the earned wisdom it conveyed, as much as anything else. Another singer might have just turned in karaoke.
I had a similar feeling to the first time I heard Johnny Cash sing “Hurt” this morning, when Willie Nelson released his recording of the Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize??”
Like “Hurt,” “Do You Realize??” is a song about mortality, written by an artist who was accessing wisdom beyond his years. It was originally recorded in 2002, the same year Cash claimed “Hurt,” and quickly became one of the Flaming Lips’ most iconic songs. It’s a staple in their live sets and has been recognized by authorities both expected—Rolling Stone named it number 31 on their list of the 100 best songs of the 2000s—and less so (it was, briefly, the official state rock song of the band’s native Oklahoma). It’s a lovely song, a meditation on the precariousness of life and the choice to find beauty in the realization that our time on this planet is finite. It sounds good when sung by the Flaming Lips’ frontman Wayne Coyne—but it sounds like something else entirely in Willie’s voice.
Willie is not a young man anymore. He is 91, and while he seems in good health, good spirits, and fine creative form, it is not saying anything untoward to acknowledge that his yesterdays far outnumber his tomorrows. With “Do You Realize??,” from his newest album Last Leaf on the Tree coming November 1, it feels abundantly clear that this is on Willie’s mind, too. Joined by his youngest son, Micah, Willie sings this cover with his voice stronger and clearer than it’s been in years, interpreting Coyne’s vaguely trippy observations (“Do you realize / we’re floating in space?”) in a way that feels entirely natural for the bemused seeker and thinker that Willie has always been, before landing on the “Do you realize that everyone you know will die?,” the song’s most devastating and humbling realization. It would be a bleak sentiment, except the line is followed by a chorus that Willie sings as comforting as a lullaby: “And instead of saying all of your goodbyes, let them know / you realize that life goes fast / it’s hard to make the good things last / you realize the sun doesn’t go down / it’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning ’round.”
I’d heard those words so many times before—the song has long been a favorite of mine—that I hadn’t realized there was something new for me to hear in them. Sung by someone I’ve been listening to since I was a child made them feel new, though. Willie, at 91, has had the time and cause to consider the nature of mortality, and hearing him deliver that sentiment brings a new depth to the song. I have always believed that Willie’s voice, always so pure and unadorned, conveys truth and good intentions; there’s no artifice to the way he sings. So to hear him find solace in those words is meaningful in a way that hearing them sung by a younger man is not.
I don’t know if “Do You Realize??” is a Willie Nelson song now, in the way that “Hurt” is a Johnny Cash song. Coyne, in a press release announcing the recording, suggested that he might think so. “You hear one second of his voice, and you go, ‘that’s him,’ ” Coyne said. But questions of ownership are unimportant anyway. We are floating in space, and everyone you know, someday, will die.
