The Power Of Negative Thinking

Written by Jon Pareles

Trent Reznor, the master of Nine Inch Nails, had everything he ever dreamed of. So why was he so miserable?

Trent Reznor's smile seemed out of place, but not to him. "Everyone has this impression of me that I'm morose," he complains. An interviewer points out that the albums he has made as Nine Inch Nails over the last decade are saturated in despair. "Point taken," he says.

Reznor, 34, is doing interviews in a New York City hotel room, sipping what is clearly not his first cup of coffee. Dressed in a black (of
course) shirt and olive pants, clean-shaven with jet-black hair, he explains how five years went by between The Downward Spiral and Nine Inch Nails' new album, The Fragile. Two years were spent on tour, including Nine Inch Nails' mudspattered appearance at Woodstock '94.
Reznor worked as a producer: on Marilyn Manson's Antichrist Superstar, on soundtrack music for Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers and David Lynch's Lost Highway, on video-game sounds for "Quake." He moved to New Orleans and built Nothing Studios in a former funeral home. And he procrastinated.

I was tired of exposing myself," he says. "With Nine Inch Nails, it was stuff out of my journal and the way I really felt about things that gave it its power. There wasn't a persona or a character in between that and me--it was me.

INNERMOST FEELINGS EXPOSED

"It's one thing when you're sitting in your bedroom thinking, `No one will hear this.' And then, after several years, millions of people have bought those records and now they think they know you, and in a weird way they do, because that's my innermost feelings laid out. I didn't want to share myself in that way anymore."

The album and tour left Reznor rich, famous, and clinically depressed.

"We started at one level, we ended at another," he says. "I've got everything I ever dreamed I could have. I've got some respect, I've got the bank account, I've got the studio. I think I have friends, whatever they are, though I was wrong about that. I gave up me as a person, as a human, to dedicate myself to this thing, and it worked.
And I'm miserable. And then I disliked myself more for feeling that
way: What's wrong with you? What are you whining about? You're the luckiest guy in the world to have this situation, and you're really, really unhappy."

PRESSURE NOT TO FAIL

Meanwhile, fans were growing impatient for a sequel to The Downward Spiral, and with Nine Inch Nails' silence, expectations and rumors grew. "I realized I was putting this-off," Reznor says. "It probably was a reaction to some of the pressure that got heaped on: `most anticipated record' this, `save rock-and-roll' that, blah blah blah blah. It's flattering to have people interested in what you do, but it can be stifling when the stakes are so high. Is this riff going to save rock? No. And you start thinking crazy stuff like that, and it's not productive. By not doing it, I didn't fail. But I did fail. I was a coward."

Reznor, who grew up in the small town of Mercer, Pennsylvania, was reared by his grandmother after his parents separated. Her death in
1997 shook him up further. He went alone to Big Sur, California, to write songs on a guitar and a piano, but didn't come back with much.
Eventually, he and his co-producer, Alan Moulder, cloistered themselves in his New Orleans studio and started working without a master plan.

A SEARCH FOR ORDER

"I tend to overthink things and overanalyze," he says. "For Downward Spiral, there was a rigid set of guidelines. There was a story that I wanted to tell. With this record, the framework and the guideline was complete train-of-thought subconscious--you go where the music takes you.

The only real conceptual thing was the title, The Fragile. I knew that before I started. I didn't want this to be a shiny slick machine, I didn't want it to be tough. The Downward Spiral has a brutality and an iciness that is a way to prevent you from getting inside. It's an armor. This record, I wanted to be like you're trying to construct something out of scraps in a desperation to make sense of things, and find order, or repair purpose.

"But it's inherently flawed--you build an empire on a fault line. But the passion and the workmanship going into trying to make something whole becomes apparent."

Instead of songs, Reznor started with sounds. "I see mood and visual as even more important than the chord changes or the harmonic content.
So, for example, we'd take the feeling I get watching a David Cronenberg movie--dread--like Dead Ringers, one of my favorite movies.
You can't put your finger on it, but you know something bad's going to happen.

"We'd think about that as a starting point. Do we want drums, or do we want anything rhythmic? Should it be car doors slamming, or people walking, or real drums, or cardboard boxes, or a bit of a sound of train chopped into pieces that might sound percussive?"

THE SOUND OF SOMEONE BURIED UNDERWATER

He ended up with an album that combines "extreme low-tech primitiveness and ultrahigh-tech overthought," he says. Some background vocals were recorded with sweaty T-shirt tied around a microphone to muffle it: "the sound of someone buried underwater and trying to get through," Reznor says.

"There is an unbelievable amount of unused material," he adds. "For every track that's on each song, there are 10 more that aren't used.
So if there's 72 tracks on each song, there's 700 that you didn't hear. That complicated way of arriving at the end result, does that make it better? I don't know the answer to that."

New York Times
November 1999