You Never Knew My Mind (Johnny Cash: Forever Words)

Chris Cornell recorded this ballad for Johnny Cash: Forever Words, a collaborative album consisting of songs created from a collection of the Man In Black's poetry, lyrics, and letters discovered in his Tennessee home after his death in 2003. The country icon's son, John Carter Cash, who curated and served as co-producer on the project, told Zane Lowe: "Through the years, there were things that [Johnny] wrote that he set aside. There were songs that he had lyrics for - maybe he had music, maybe [he] didn't - that he never recorded. There were also things that he wrote. He wrote 'You Never Knew My Mind' in 1967. I assume and I'm fairly certain it was written for his first wife, Vivian. That was the year that their divorce was legal. It was also the year where his love for my mother flourished. So 'You Never Knew My Mind' was not something that he would have released at that time because my mother was standing beside him."

Twenty-one years after Johnny Cash recorded his cover of Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage" for his Unchained album, the Seattle band's frontman Chris Cornell laid down "You Never Knew My Mind", setting Cash's own words to his original music. "I met Chris backstage in the early 1990s when my father performed a show in Seattle," John Carter Cash, explained. "Chris told me then that he had been a fan of my father even when most of his friends listened to hard rock. When I was conceiving this album years later, I reached out to him, and he was excited and honored to be involved. Chris connected deeply with my father's words, and his finished version of 'You Never Knew My Mind' tied his own life experience to my father's on an honest level."

One of Chris Cornell's last recordings before his own passing, the Soundgarden singer recorded the track at Cash Cabin Studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Cornell was found dead in a hotel room at the MGM Grand Detroit hotel on May 18, 2017.