In the 1980s, Johnny Cash, the former king of country, was increasingly marginalized and forgotten. After a series of failed albums, Columbia, his label of 25 years, dropped him.

But his career was not quite over. Producer Rick Rubin saw Cash perform alongside Bob Dylan at Madison Square Garden in 1992 and recognized that “the Man in Black”—though aging, battered, drained by battles with drug addiction, and left behind by a changing genre and a changing world—wasn’t finished yet. Rubin approached Cash about recording some more albums, just Cash with his guitar in front of a microphone, recording whatever songs he wanted. The old singer agreed.

It’s these final songs that speak to me most. In fact, I know little of Cash’s oeuvre other than these “afterglow” songs. I find his old, frayed, quavering, and vulnerable voice on his final album, American IV: The Man Comes Around, more appealing even than his richer, smoother, younger voice. Moreover, he tackles some weighty themes in these final songs from the perspective of an older man who has seen much, done much, and whose eyes are now turning toward the permanent things.

The first song on the album, “When the Man Comes Around,” reveals that Cash’s thoughts, here at the end of his career and his life, are centering around death and eternity. The song appears to be about the Last Judgement.

But perhaps the song that most powerfully communicates Cash’s state of mind—especially when coupled with the powerful music video by Mark Romanek—is “Hurt.” It’s actually a cover of a song by a much younger musician in a very different genre, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. Yet Cash’s raw, heartfelt rendering transforms it and makes it his own—even Reznor acknowledged, “that song isn’t mine anymore.” As RadioX points out, Cash takes a song about a young man headed toward self-destruction and reinterprets it as an old man’s meditation on his life. And it’s a meditation filled with regret.

Cash sings:

I hurt myself today.
To see if I still feel.

…

Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything.

What have I become,
my sweetest friend?
Everyone I know
goes away in the end.

We might find these strange words from someone who, so to speak, “had it all,” at least at one point, and who was wildly successful in worldly terms. Wouldn’t he want to remember everything? Wouldn’t he know what he had become and be proud of it? Cash is too reflective and honest for that. Celebrity or not, at the end of the day—and the end of a life and a career—he’s just a man, a man who made many memories, perhaps many mistakes he wishes he could forget. Moreover, he’s a man who knows that death is not far away. Indeed, he would die the year after he recorded the song, and just months after recording the video for it with Romanek.

When Cash sings, “And you could have it all, my empire of dirt,” one wonders whether this is his final analysis of what all his fame and money really was. “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world…” All the glory of his career couldn’t stop him from growing old, becoming “irrelevant,” getting sick, facing death. The song makes us ask, when you’ve seen it all, done it all, won it all—then what? Especially when you find yourself on that threshold between worlds?

All of this is made more poignant by Romanek’s video, which juxtaposes footage of Cash as a young man, in his glory days—at the peak of his fame, handsome, athletic, suave—with footage of the old, wrinkled Cash sitting in a dusty museum of his own abandoned memorabilia. As Christopher Hooton writes, “[it’s] a heart-wrenching music video, that [speaks] about the transience of life, the gracelessness of death, the Ozymandian crumbling of an oeuvre and the decline of a genre, an era and an attitude.”

Surrounded by old photographs, broken records, posters, Cash laments: “You are someone else. I am still right here.” These words might be addressed to the world that has moved on from him and his work. In some sense, I think these are the words of every elderly person who experiences, in the end, the feeling that though he may have remained the same, held to the same principles, the world has not. It is ever-changing, fickle.

Again, with the line, “I will let you down. I will make you hurt,” we are struck by Cash’s authenticity and humility. Fame doesn’t fix faults or weaknesses of character. If anything, it makes them worse. But, beyond that, these are words that all of us can relate to, they bear universal significance (as all great art does). This is the human condition: We do let each other down.

But a hint of Christian imagery appears with “I wear this crown of thorns.” Romanek emphasizes the point by including brief shots of Christ carrying His cross, being nailed to it, hanging on it. During one of the choruses, as Cash sings, “I will let you down, I will make you hurt,” he’s looking at a painting of Jesus. Are these words, in part, addressed to Him? Is Cash acknowledging his own sins, which cost Christ His blood? Romanek certainly is leaning into this interpretation.

At any rate, such a thought breathes a note of hope into a song and video that are, frankly, devastating to watch and listen to. Toward the end of the song, Cash says, “If I could start again, a million miles away, I would keep myself, I would find a way.” These words, too, might dwell  in the soul of many an elderly person, reflecting on life regrets. Oh, for a chance to start again, to set things right! What does Cash mean by “keeping himself”? It’s not clear. But again, the words of Christ spring to mind, “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but suffers the loss of his soul?” That is, if he loses himself?

Along with his regrets about his own actions, I suspect that an old man suffers, at times, from a feeling of having been discarded by the world, especially in our culture. As Rubin told National Public Radio:

I feel like it’s really an issue with our society that we discard good things before their time just because they get old or look a little ragged. And I don’t think age in any way took away from Johnny’s greatness. And in many ways, as he got older, and even as his voice may have gotten weaker, it somehow was able to convey emotion in an even deeper way and, you know, we can’t discount the wisdom.

Cash’s powerful piece of art shows just how wrong our societal negligence of the elderly really is. He showed how vital his soul remained, even if his body was weakened by illness and age. He not only solidified his reputation with this song, proving he still had much to offer the world if it would listen, but also produced an enduring work of art, which has the power to transcend time. Time may wither faces and fell empires, but it cannot alter truth and beauty.