In the 1990s, someone had the off-the-wall idea to strip this Nine Inch Nails song down to guitar and add Johnny Cash's time-enriched voice, and the recording that resulted has been growing steadily in stature from head-scratching novelty to cultural touchstone. (That someone was Rick Rubin, the legendary hip-hop producer, which makes the idea off-the-Green-Monster.)

I think we all know the reason why this version works so well. For as much as Trent Reznor may have been through in his life and late-blooming career by the time he wrote this song, there was almost no living human more qualified than Johnny Cash to perform it from the point of looking back on an entire extraordinary life lived, maximized, wasted, and saved. The words ring true and horrifying. He spent a lifetime working and working and working tirelessly through fallouts and tragedies only to express here that his achievements may have amounted to a mere "empire of dirt." There was seemingly not a person left that he felt he could relate to personally, all relationships sacrificed at the altar of quintessential American success. Johnny Cash, rest in peace, has a mythic external legacy, but it came at a deep cost.

Without success or failure, triumph or regret, there is still music.

His plain, stoic performance, with all dissonances of the original version removed, is one his most unexpected and indelible.