Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are looking
at a figure who I think just defies pretty much
every box you try to put him in. Oh, completely.
We are talking about Trent Reznor. And if your
first thought is just, oh, the guy from Nine
Inch Nails, the industrial rock guy who screams
in the dark, you are missing about 80 % of the
picture. At least 80%, yeah. I'd argue that the
industrial rock guy is just one distinct era
in a life that has been more about... Well, architecture
than just songwriting. Architecture is a great
word for it. It really is. Because we're talking
about a guy who went from being the absolute
face of 90s angst. I mean, literally covered
in mud at Woodstock 94 to wearing a tuxedo and
accepting Academy Awards for scoring Pixar movies.
Yeah. That is not a normal career path. It's
one of those fascinating trajectories in modern
cultural history, not just music history. I mean,
think about it. Most artists from that specific,
you know, gloomy, aggressive 90s era either.
Burned out. They burned out. They faded away.
Or they're currently playing the state fair circuit.
Reznor did something completely different. He
pivoted. And he didn't just pip it. He, like,
ascended. So what we have in front of us today
is a massive stack of sources. We've got biographies,
discographies, industry reports. even court documents,
that cover his career from way back in 1982 all
the way up to the present day. We're going to
look at the music, obviously. That's the core
of it. But we're also going to look at the business
side of things. Because Trent Reznor is arguably
as much of a tech visionary and a disruptor as
he is a musician. So our mission today is to
really unpack that journey. How does a kid from
small town USA, and I mean that literally we're
talking about cornfields, go from waxing studio
floors to becoming a tech executive and a film
score titan? And how did he do it? How did he
manage to reinvent himself so many times without
losing that specific, that intensity? That's
the word. The intensity. I think it really comes
down to a few core themes. You see them over
and over. Control, isolation, and this relentless,
almost obsessive drive to escape boundaries.
Whether those are geographical boundaries, musical
ones. Or corporate ones, yeah, absolutely. Well,
let's start at the beginning then, the geography
part. Because I think people assume Trent Reznor
just spawned, fully formed in some dark warehouse
in Berlin or something. Right, like he's assembled
in a factory. No, he's actually from Pennsylvania.
Deep in Pennsylvania. Specifically Newcastle,
born in 1965. But he was raised in a town called
Mercer. And we really need to linger on Mercer
for a second because the way he describes it
is absolutely vital to understanding everything
that comes later. What did he say? He calls it
a life of cornfields. Cornfields. Just endless
rows of nothing. Exactly. He said in an interview
that there was, and I'm quoting here, nothing
going on. You have to put yourself in the context
of the 1970s and early 80s. No internet. No internet,
no Spotify, no social media. If you live in a
cornfield town, you are effectively cut off from
the cultural vein of the world. It's not like
today where you can find your tribe online. It's
total isolation. And it wasn't just geographical
isolation. There was a family situation that
compounded it. A huge one. His parents divorced
when he was six years old, which is a key detail.
His younger sister, Tara, stayed with their mother,
but Trent was sent to live with his maternal
grandparents. So at six years old, your whole
world breaks apart. You're separated from your
parents, from your sister. That has to be incredibly
isolating. Absolutely. He's described his childhood
as very sheltered because of that environment.
His grandparents were loving, by all accounts,
but it was a quiet, contained world. He said
his life experience basically came from watching
movies, watching TV, and reading books. So he's
living vicariously. He's living through media.
He was looking at these magazines, you know,
probably Rolling Stone or Cream, and seeing people
with these creative careers and interesting lives.
And he said, quote, none of that happened where
I was. You're almost taught to realize it's not
for you. Wow. That is a feeling I think a lot
of creative people from small towns can relate
to, that sense that real life is happening somewhere
else, in New York or London or L .A., and you're
just stuck watching it on a screen. It creates
a hunger, a real desperate need to break out.
For Reznor, that isolation fueled a desire to
escape. But here's the really surprising part,
especially considering the aggressive industrial
sound he became famous for. Okay. You might expect
his teenage years were full of, you know, delinquency,
setting fires, that kind of thing. Right. The
typical bad boy origin story. But he wasn't that
at all. Not even close. He was a classic band
kid. This is my favorite fact in the whole stack.
And I just want to make sure the listener really
visualizes this for a second. Amazing. Trent
Reznor, the Prince of Darkness, the guy who wrote
Head Like a Hole, played the tuba. The tuba.
And the tenor saxophone. He was in the jazz band
and the marching band at Mercer Area Junior Senior
High School. And he wasn't just some kid sitting
in the back holding the instrument. He was good.
He was dedicated. And a theater kid too. A huge
theater kid. He was voted best in drama by his
classmates. He played Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar.
Which, if you think about his later vocal delivery
and the themes of Betrayal. That's actually perfect
casting. It's perfect casting. And he also played
Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man. Yeah,
gut treble, right here in Mercer City. It just
completely disrupts the narrative of the brooding
artist. His former band director, a guy named
Dr. Hendry, actually remembered him as very upbeat
and friendly. Upbeat and friendly. It just goes
to show that the persona we see on stage is a
construct, or at least a specific channel for
certain emotions, not his entire personality.
But musically, this band kid background is so
crucial. Why? It means he understands theory.
He understands composition. He can read music.
He's not just some guy banging on trash cans
and making noise. He knows how music works from
the ground up. He has the formal training. That
makes so much sense. Industrial music, for all
its chaos, is very structured. It's often machine
-like on a grid. If you have a marching band
background, you understand that kind of grid
-like precision. Precisely. But the spark, the
moment he knew he wanted to apply all that discipline
to rock and roll, that came in 1976. He went
to his very first concert. Okay, so who did he
see? The Velvet Underground. Black Sabbath. Something
dark and heavy. The Eagles. The Eagles. As in
Hotel California. Peaceful, easy -feeling Eagles.
The very same. That is the least industrial band
I can possibly imagine. It is. But you have to
see it through the eyes of an 11 -year -old kid
from Mercer, Pennsylvania. It wasn't about the
genre. It was about the scale. It was the spectacle.
He said the excitement of that night just struck
a chord. He looked at that massive stage, the
lights, the adoration of the crowd, and he thought,
someday I'd love to be up there. So it wasn't
about a specific sound at that point. It was
about the platform. It was the escape vehicle.
It was the escape vehicle. So fast forward. Yeah.
He graduates high school in 83. He heads to Allegheny
College to study computer engineering. Which,
again, tracks perfectly with his later obsession
with technology and synthesizers. Totally. But
he drops out after a year. The cornfields are
still too close. He's got to get to a real city.
So he moves to Cleveland. He moves to Cleveland.
And this is where the hustle really begins. We
need to talk about the Cleveland scene in the
mid-'80s because it wasn't exactly New York or
London, but it had a pulse. It had a scene. And
Reznor dives right in. He joins a string of bands.
Option 30, The Innocent Exotic Birds. Yep. These
all sound like very 80s new wave band names,
don't they? Very synth -pop. You can just picture
the haircuts. And they were. Very synth -pop.
He was a keyboard player for hire, basically.
And here's a fun little anecdote for you movie
buffs out there. During this period, he actually
appeared in a Michael J. Fox movie. Wait, really?
A blockbuster. Not quite a blockbuster. The film
was Light of Day from 1987. It starred Michael
J. Fox and Joan Jett as rock and roll siblings.
Reznor is in a fictional band in the movie called
The Problems. The problems. I love it. He's in
the background playing keyboards. It's a real
blink and you'll miss it moment. He's got this
goofy 80s hair, but it just shows he was grinding.
He was taking whatever gig he could get to be
near the industry. But he wasn't just playing
keyboards in fictional dance, right? He had to
pay the rent. And this is the crucial part. He
got a job at Right Track Studio in Cleveland.
Now, usually when you hear musician gets a job
at studio, you think, okay, producer or session
player, something glamorous. Yeah. Reznor was
an assistant engineer and... A janitor. A janitor.
He cleaned the toilets and he waxed the floors.
I want to pause on this because the janitor moment
is often treated as just a fun piece of trivia,
but I think it's actually the most important
strategic move of his entire early life. I agree
completely. Right? You have to understand the
economics of recording music in 1988 versus today.
It's a different planet. Oh, totally. Today,
you can record a Grammy -winning album on a laptop
in your bedroom. The barrier to entry is basically
zero. Right. You buy Logic Pro for $200 and a
decent microphone, and you're good to go. Not
in 1988. In 1988, to make a record that sounded
professional, you needed a massive mixing console
that cost as much as a house. You needed 2 -inch
tape, which cost hundreds of dollars per reel.
You needed racks and racks of outboard gear compressors,
reverbs, delays. We are talking about hundreds
of thousands of dollars of equipment. And the
studio time itself cost, what, $100 an hour?
$200? Easily. Yeah. Which, adjusted for inflation,
is like $400 or $500 an hour today. A kid from
Mercer with no money cannot afford that. It's
an impossible dream. So taking the janitor job
wasn't just about paying the bills. It was about
proximity. It was about access. The studio owner,
a man named Bart Koester, said something very
telling in an interview. He said, when that guy
waxed the floor, it looked great. Of course he
did. Even when he was cleaning toilets, Reznor
was a perfectionist. He had this intense focus.
And because of that work ethic, Coaster cut him
a deal. The golden ticket. He told Reznor he
could use the studio during downtime, which basically
meant the middle of the night when no paying
clients were there, to record his own demos for
free. He just had to pay for the minor wear and
tear on the tape heads. So while the entire city
of Cleveland is sleeping, Trent Reznor is in
this high end professional recording studio all
alone, teaching himself how to use all this gear
that he could never, ever afford to rent. That
is the genesis of Nine Inch Nails. It's the isolation
of Mercer, but now it's been transferred to a
dark studio in Cleveland at 3 a .m. It's just
him and the machines. And this leads us directly
to the architecture of the band, as you put it,
because Nine Inch Nails sounds like a group.
It sounds like four or five guys in a garage.
But it wasn't. No, not at all. Reznor ran into
a problem very early on. He couldn't find a band
in Cleveland that could play the songs the way
he heard them in his head. He said that he felt
other musicians diluted the vision. They couldn't
articulate what he wanted. So he pulled a Prince.
He pulled a Prince. He decided to play everything
himself. Keyboards, guitars, bass, programming,
basically everything except the drums. He realized
that if he wanted total control over the sound,
he had to become the entire band. Which is a
massive undertaking. I mean, Prince was a once
-in -a -generation virtuoso player. He could
pick up any instrument and just shred. Was Reznor
on that same level as a pure instrumentalist?
That's a really good distinction to make. Prince
was pure feel. He was a natural, a virtuoso performer.
Reznor was more of a tech wizard. A sonic architect.
He wasn't necessarily the best guitarist in the
world, but he knew how to process that guitar
sound to make it do exactly what he wanted. He
was building a soundscape, not just jamming.
So Pretty Hate Machine drops in 1989. This is
the fruit of all those late night janitorial
sessions. And it's a hit, right? It was a moderate
success commercially at first, but in the underground,
it's massive. It was a slow burn that just kept
selling. It eventually went triple platinum.
Why did it connect so strongly? It connected
because it bridged two worlds that didn't usually
mix. It had the aggressive clanking percussion
of industrial music, you know, bands like Skinny
Puppy or Ministry. But it had these undeniable
pop hooks, these incredibly kecky choruses. Head
Like a Hole is a catchy song. You can absolutely
hum it. Exactly. It's industrial music you can
dance to. And the lyrics were pure, uncut teenage
diary angst. I'd rather die than give you control.
That line resonated with alienated kids everywhere.
But with success came the one thing Trent Reznor
hates most in the world. Interference. Interference.
The label got involved. TVT Records. They saw
Pretty Hate Machine selling and they said, great,
give us another one just like that, but make
it a plop hit. Make it for the radio. They essentially
wanted him to be a synth pop star. And knowing
what we know about Reznor now, the guy who wouldn't
compromise on how to wax a floor, I assume he
just loved being told to make a pop album. He
hated it. He felt completely stifled. He felt
they were treating him like a cash cow rather
than an artist. So in a move that really foreshadows
all his future legal battles, he went to war.
To avoid their interference, he actually started
recording his next project under pseudonyms.
He went underground to make his own music while
signed to a label. He did. He recorded what would
become the Broken EP in secret in various studios,
paying for it himself. And the sound of Broken.
I mean, if Pretty Hate Machine was a bridge between
pop and industrial, Broken was him dousing that
bridge in gasoline and lighting a match. That's,
it's that different. It is significantly heavier,
angrier, faster, and more abrasive. It's almost
a pure metal record in some places. It's basically
a sonic middle finger to his record label. And
it worked. It worked. The behind -the -scenes
machinations were complex, involving Interscope
Records and Jimmy Iovine, but the end result
was that he managed to get released from his
contract with TVT and signed to Interscope, bringing
the finished, broken EP with him. He won a Grammy
for the song Wish off that EP, a metal performance
Grammy for a guy who started out playing keyboards.
Oh, he wins his freedom. He proves his point.
But then we get to the big one, the magnum opus,
1994, The Downward Spiral. This is the landmark.
This is the album that defines industrial rock
for the entire 90s generation. But the creation
of it is. It's heavy. And we absolutely need
to talk about the location. Because where you
record an album changes how that record sounds.
He didn't stay in a studio in Cleveland for this
one. No. He moved to Los Angeles. And for the
recording, he ended up renting a house. at a
10 and 50 Cielo Drive in Benedict, Kenya. That
address sends a shiver down the spine of anyone
who knows American history. It should. It's the
site of the Tate -LaBianca murders committed
by the Manson family in 1969. Whoa. Okay, let's
stop right there. He deliberately moves into
the Manson murder house to record an album called
The Downward Spiral. That feels incredibly intentional.
That feels like edgelord behavior, to use a modern
term. It's a huge point of controversy, and he's
been asked about it for decades. He built a studio
inside the living room, right where the murders
happened, and he named the studio Le Pig, which
was named after the word pig that Susan Etkin
scrawled in Sharon Tate's blood on the front
door. I mean, that is grim. It's beyond grim.
It is grim. Now, Reznor's defense has always
been... at least initially, that he didn't pick
the house for what he called serial killer bullshit.
He told Entertainment Weekly at the time that
he just looked at a lot of places, he liked the
layout of this one, the vibe felt right, and
it just happened to be that house. Do we buy
that? I mean, really, you accidentally rent the
single most infamous murder house in Hollywood
history. It's very hard to buy Philly. He later
admitted to having a fascination with what he
called American folklore. He saw the house as
part of a dark American history, an artifact.
But there's a story he tells that completely
changed his perspective on it. What happened?
During the recording sessions, he had a chance
encounter with Sharon Tate's sister, Patty Tate.
Oh, wow. Yeah. And she confronted him. She basically
asked him flat out, are you exploiting my sister's
death for being cool, for selling records? And
Reznor said that question just really shook him
to his core. It grounded the horror in reality.
It did. He realized that for him, it was this
abstract American folklore. But for her, it was
her sister being butchered in that room. He said
he went home that night and just cried. He realized
he'd crossed a line. He moved out after that,
didn't he? And the house was torn down. He did.
He said the experience made him reevaluate a
lot of things. But regardless of the intent,
the atmosphere of that house undoubtedly seeped
into the record. The Downward Spiral is a claustrophobic,
intense, terrifying album. It sounds like a mental
breakdown recorded on tape. And yet that's the
album that launched him into the stratosphere.
Closer became this huge, unlikely hit. Hurt became
an instant standard that Johnny Cash would later
cover. He was suddenly one of the biggest rock
stars in the world. He was. But then near silence.
Or at least a very, very long gap in terms of
new Nine Inch Nails studio albums. This brings
us to what the sources call the dark years, post
-1994. He's touring extensively, including that
legendary Woodstock 94 performance where the
whole band came out covered in mud. But underneath
all the success, he's starting to crumble. He's
really struggling. That perfectionism we talked
about is now paralyzing him. He has massive writer's
block because, I mean, how do you follow up an
album as iconic as the downward spiral? And he's
dealing with severe addiction issues. We'll get
into the mechanics of the addiction in just a
moment, but... Musically, this all leads to The
Fragile in 1999, five years later. That's a lifetime
in the music industry back then. It is. And The
Fragile is a double album. It's this massive,
sprawling, ambitious undertaking. Critically,
looking back, many people now consider it his
masterpiece. It's dense. It's atmospheric. It's
often beautiful. But at the time, it flopped.
It didn't flop, but it definitely underperformed
commercially. It lost money for the label. It
was incredibly expensive to make. And it didn't
have a clear, punchy radio single like Closer.
It was too complex, too long for casual radio
listening. I read in one of the reports that
he actually funded the entire North American
tour. for the fragile out of his own pocket?
He did. The label wouldn't support it, so he
financed it himself. That's how much he believed
in the vision. He was willing to bet his own
fortune on it. But you can see the strain building.
He was fighting the label. who just wanted another
hit. He was fighting his own demons and he was
fighting to maintain artistic control in an industry
that was rapidly starting to change. Let's unpack
those demons because segment three of our outline
really focuses on his addiction and his subsequent
sobriety. It seems like the mid to late 90s were
really the bottom for him personally. They were.
After the massive success of The Downward Spiral,
he fell into a deep depression. And this is where
that childhood story comes right back into focus.
His maternal grandmother, the woman who raised
him in the cornfields, who was a surrogate mother,
she passed away. That must have been devastating.
She was his anchor, the one stable figure. Exactly.
Losing her, combined with the immense pressure
of being crowned the voice of a generation and
the emptiness that often follows huge success,
it sent him spiraling. He was abusing alcohol
and cocaine heavily. He didn't hide from it in
later interviews. No, he was very blunt about
it. He said, quote, I had become a terrible addict.
I needed to get my shit together. He was essentially
living the destructive narrative of the downward
spiral in his real life. The art had become reality.
But there was a surprising influence that helped
turn him around. And this is another one of those
connections that feels almost too perfect, like
it's from a movie script. David Bowie. David
Bowie. Yes. Nine Inch Nails toured as the opening
act for Bowie in 1995 and 1996. It was the outside
tour. Now, I want you to just imagine this scenario.
Reznor is at the absolute peak of his fame. He's
the dark prince of industrial rock. But behind
the scenes, he's a complete mess. Right. And
then there's Bowie. He's older. He's past his
commercial peak from the 70s and 80s. But he's
vibrant, he's endlessly creative, and most importantly,
he's sober. Bowie had his own infamous cocaine
years in the 70s, the Thin White Duke period.
Right. Bowie was the Thin White Duke, famously
living on a diet of red peppers, milk, and cocaine.
He had been exactly where Reznor was. And Reznor
looked at Bowie, who was happy, healthy, and
still making challenging art. and saw that there
was a way out. A roadmap. A roadmap. He saw that
you didn't have to die young to be a legend.
You could age. You could evolve. You could have
a life. It wasn't an immediate fix, though. The
turnaround didn't happen right after that tour.
No, it took several more years. Addiction is
a beast. But Bowie planted the seed. He was a
mentor, almost a ghost of future past for Reznor.
Reznor finally hit rock bottom after the fragile
tour and went to rehab, completing it in 2001.
And the music changed after that. You can hear
the shift. You can absolutely hear it. The first
album post -rehab was With Teeth in 2005. And
it sounds clearer. It's more focused. The drums
are punchier, more direct. The fog has lifted
sonically. And it went straight to number one
on the Billboard 200 chart. Which must have proven
something crucial to him. Oh, absolutely. It
proved that he didn't need the drugs to create.
That is the great fear of every addicted artist.
If I get sober, will I lose my edge? Will the
muse leave? With teeth, prove that the edge was
in him, not in the bottle or the powder. And
his personal life stabilized in a way that I
think really shocks people who only know him
from the lyrics of Closer. Right. The angry,
isolated young man found a new path. He married
Mary Keane Mandig in 2009, and they now have
five children. Five kids. From the guy who wrote
Hurt. I mean, that's a lot of soccer practices.
It's a profound change. It's a profound evolution.
In 2023, he actually expressed reluctance to
tour as Nine Inch Nails, specifically because
he didn't want to miss his children's lives.
He said he wanted to prioritize his family over
the machine of touring. It's a complete 180 from
the isolation of his youth. He built the stable
family unit he didn't have as a child. Speaking
of the machine, let's switch gears to the industry
side of things, because Trent Reznor isn't just
an artist. He is a guy who has gone to literal
war with the business of music and won. Oh, absolutely.
And he has the scars to prove it. The biggest
and most revealing battle, and this is a real
cautionary tale for any creative person listening
right now, was the lawsuit against his former
manager, John Malm Jr., in 2004. This story is
just wild. So Malm was his manager from the very
beginning, right? From the Cleveland days. From
the early days. They were partners. Malm was
more than a manager. He was the co -owner of
their company. But when Reznor finally got sober
in 2001 and started to look at his finances,
really look at them with a clear head for the
first time in years, he realized something was
desperately wrong. What did he find? He found
that he had sold millions and millions of records.
He had sold out arenas all over the world. But
he only had about $400 ,000 in liquid cash to
his name. That doesn't add up at all. Where did
all the money go? It went to the manager. The
contract he had signed as a young, naive artist
stipulated that mom got 20 % of Reznor's gross
earnings. Okay, let's unpack that for a second.
I want to do a little business one here because
the difference between gross and net sounds boring,
but it's actually life or death in business.
Let's use a simple lemonade stand analogy. Let's
say you run a lemonade stand. It costs you $9
to buy the lemons, the sugar, and the cups. You
sell the entire pitcher of lemonade for $10.
Okay, so I made $1 of profit. That's my net,
my take -home pay. Right. Now, if your manager
takes a standard 20 % of the net, he takes 20
cents from your $1 profit. You keep 80 cents.
Seems fair enough. That sounds totally standard.
But Malm's contract took 20 % of the gross. The
gross is the total revenue, that $10 sales figure.
So you sell the pitcher for $10. Malm immediately
takes his 20%, which is $2, right off the top.
But wait a minute. It cost me $9 to make the
lemonade. If he takes $2, I only have $8 left.
Exactly. You just lost $1. You are literally
paying to work. Now, apply that same math to
a massive global tour. Tours are incredibly expensive.
You have to pay for the trucks, the lights, the
sound system, the road crew, the buses, the hotels.
A tour might gross $10 million in ticket sales,
but cost $9 million to run. So under this contract,
Malm takes his 20 % of the gross. That's $2 million.
And Reznor is left with the remaining $8 million
to pay $9 million in bills. Reznor ends up $1
million in debt from a successful tour, while
his manager walks away with $2 million in cash.
That is predatory. It's insane that it's even
legal. The jury thought it was more than just
bad business. Reznor sued Mom for fraud and breach
of fiduciary duties. The jury awarded Reznor
nearly $3 million, which is about $5 million
adjusted for inflation today. And just as crucially,
the verdict restored his control over his trademarks,
including the iconic NI logo. So he wins his
freedom. He wins his name back. He gets his finances
in order. But he wasn't done fighting the machine.
He then turned his sights on the record labels
themselves. This was the year zero era around
2007. The music industry was in a full blown
panic because of Napster and digital piracy.
Their solution, which was completely backwards,
was to jack up the prices on physical CDs. Right.
Risner was on tour in Australia and saw that
his new album was being sold for an exorbitant
price. I think it was something like 30 Australian
dollars. And he called them out on it publicly.
Oh, he called it absurd in all caps. He went
on a tirade accusing Universal Music Group of
ripping off his true fans just to prop up their
dying, outdated business model. And he didn't
just complain on a blog or something. He said
something on stage that I think every single
label executive at the time must have had nightmares
about. He told the crowd to steal his music.
Literally. Literally. He stood on stage and said,
steal it, steal and steal and steal some more
and give it to all your friends and keep on stealing.
He actively encouraged piracy of his own work.
Now, I have to play devil's advocate here for
a second. It's pretty easy for Trent Reznor,
a multimillionaire rock star, to stand up and
say, steal my music. Can a new artist, someone
just starting out, really afford to say that?
That is the million dollar question, isn't it?
And frankly, no new artist can't. Reznor was
in a very privileged position to be able to burn
that bridge. He had already made his name. But
his core point was that the value of music wasn't
in the plastic disc anymore. It was in the relationship
with the fan. So the label, by gouging the fan
on the price, was actually hurting the long -term
relationship. They were damaging the brand. Yeah.
Reznor was prioritizing the long -term health
of his fan base over a short -term CD sale. And
he put his money where his mouth was. In 2008,
he released the next album, The Slip. And how
did he release it? He didn't even do a pay what
you want model like Radiohead did with In Rainbows.
He just put the entire album in multiple high
quality digital formats on his website for free.
No strings attached. His message was simply,
this one's on me. And what was the response?
It was downloaded 1 .4 million times in the first
six weeks. It showed that he understood the new
digital landscape better than the labels did.
He understood that in the Internet age, access
and goodwill were more valuable than scarcity.
If 1 .4 million people have your album, that's
1 .4 million potential ticket buyers for your
next tour. This tech -savvy mindset, this understanding
of the digital world, actually led him into the
corporate world, oddly enough. This rebellious
pirate ended up wearing a badge at Apple? It's
one of the great ironies of his career. He joined
Beats Electronics as the chief creative officer.
His big project was codenamed Daisy, and his
goal was to solve the problem of music discovery
in the streaming age. What was the problem he
saw? He hated algorithms. He hated that Spotify
would just feed you more of what you already
liked. He wanted to create a streaming service
that felt like having your own guy at the record
store. A human curator who knows what you like,
but can also push you to discover something new.
That project eventually became Beats Music, which
was then bought by Apple for $3 billion and became
the foundation of Apple Music. So Trent Reznor
was an Apple executive. He was. For a while.
But it didn't last. He eventually left, saying
that the corporate environment felt at odds with
the artist in me. He realized that being a corporate
executive means sitting in meetings about marketing
budgets and user acquisition, not making art.
He's a guy who needs to be in the studio creating.
Well, speaking of creating, let's look at his
collaborations. Because for a guy who famously
started as a one -man band because he couldn't
play well with others, he sure collaborates a
lot now. It's true. It's another one of his great
evolutions. And the range of his collaborations
is just staggering. Early on, he produced Marilyn
Manson's breakout albums like Antichrist superstar.
He really shaped that sound. But that relationship
soured pretty badly due to competition and personal
issues. But then you have something completely
out of left field, like Old Town Road. Laughs.
Yes, the biggest song in the history of the Billboard
charts for a while. So the story is that Lil
Nas X sampled a nine inch nails instrumental
track called 34 Ghosts the Fifth. from the Ghosts
IV album. He didn't ask first, did he? No, he
just bought the beat online from a Dutch producer
for like $30, not even realizing it was an NIN
sample. The song blew up, and suddenly Reznor's
lawyers are on the phone. Reznor could have sued
him into oblivion. He could have blocked the
song from ever being released properly. He could
have, and a lot of artists from his generation
absolutely would have. But Reznor didn't. He
cleared the sample. He allowed it to happen.
He was supportive. He got a songwriting credit
and a Country Music Association award out of
it, didn't he? He did. Trent Reznor is a CMA
award winner. But what's really interesting is
how he handled the fame of it. He declined to
be in the music video. He didn't want to show
up on stage with Lil Nas X. He said, this is
his time, not mine. It shows a real maturity.
He's happy to facilitate and get paid for it,
but he doesn't need to hog the spotlight anymore.
He also produced Halsey's album, If I Can't Have
Love, I Want Power, in 2021. Which was a brilliant
move. He took a massive pop star Halsey and gave
her this gritty, raw, industrial edge. The album
sounds like a lost Nine Inch Nails record, but
with her vocals. It garnered huge critical acclaim
and showed that he can translate his specific
sound to a new generation without it sounding
like old guy trying to be cool. But the most
important creative partnership of his modern
era is definitely with Atticus Ross. Without
a doubt. Atticus Ross had been working with him
for years as a programmer and producer. But in
2016, Reznor made him the only other official
member of Nine Inch Nails. They are a true duo
now. And together they launched what is essentially
Trent Reznor's second act, film scoring. And
this isn't just some side gig for them. They
are dominating Hollywood. It all started with
David Fincher. Fincher approached Reznor to score
his film The Social Network in 2010. Reznor was
actually reluctant at first. He said reading
the script ruined his planned year off because
he knew it was so good. that he had to do it
and thank god he did that score i mean let's
just try to describe it it doesn't sound like
a typical movie score at all there's no sweeping
orchestra there are no violins swelling when
two characters have a moment no it's electronic
it's twitchy it's anxious it uses these buzzing
arpeggiated modular synthesizers that sound like
electricity and code it perfectly captured the
feeling of the digital world and the social anxiety
of the characters it completely redefined what
a drama score could sound like And it won them
the Academy Award for Best Original Score on
their first try. First try wins an Oscar. Not
a bad start. They became Fincher's go -to composers
after that. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,
which won them a Grammy. And then Gone Girl.
Oh, I love the story about the Gone Girl score.
It gives you such a perfect insight into their
creative process. So Gone Girl is a movie about
a marriage that looks absolutely perfect on the
outside, but is just rotten hatred and deception
on the inside. Fincher told Reznor and Ross that
he wanted music that sounded like an insincere
facade. An insincere facade? What does that even
mean musically? Well, Fincher had been at a chiropractor's
office and he heard this soothing, but... ultimately
terrible, cheesy, new age massage music. And
he told them, make that. Make the musical equivalent
of that false comfort. That is so creepy and
so perfect. So Reznor and Ross created this beautiful,
soothing, ambient music, but then they let it
curdle. They added just a little bit of dissonance
under the surface, a little bit of noise, a slightly
off -key note, so you feel deeply uneasy listening
to it. You know something is wrong, even when
the music is telling you to relax. It's psychological
warfare through sound. It is. But they haven't
just stuck to Dark Fincher thrillers. They scored
Soul for Pixar. Which is wild. Nine Inch Nails
doing a Disney Pixar movie about the afterlife.
And they won another Oscar for it. which they
shared with Jean -Baptiste. They did the Watchmen
series for HBO and won an Emmy. They are just
racking up the hardware. But they don't love
everything they do, right? What was the story
with the Sandra Bullock movie Bird Box? Reznor
was very blunt about that one. He called the
experience an effing waste of time. He felt the
production team phoned it in and that the final
sound mix of the movie buried their music so
low you couldn't even hear it. He has no patience
for mediocrity. If he's going to commit to a
project, he wants it to be excellent. And he's
got a really busy slate coming up, too. Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mutant Mayhem, the new
Luca Guadagnino film Challengers, and Tron Aries
in 2025. He is working harder now as a composer
than he ever did as a touring rock star. But
he's working on his own terms. That's the key
difference. He's not living on a tour bus for
18 months. He's working in his own studio with
his creative partner, making art that he believes
in. And then he goes home to his family. So we've
talked about the history, the business, the movies.
Let's dig into the sound itself. Segment six.
What makes a Trent Reznor song sound like a Trent
Reznor song? Well, People magazine once famously
described it as self -loathing sexual obsession
mixed with synthesized beats, which is crude,
but it's not inaccurate for the early stuff.
It's that baritone voice, right? It's just unmistakable,
whether he's whispering or screaming. It's the
baritone range for sure. But I think the real
secret sauce is the contrast. That is the core
of the Nine Inch Nails sound. He mixes very aggressive,
distorted, ugly noise sounds that should be painful
to listen to. These very beautiful, fragile,
elegant piano melodies. It's beauty and decay
happening at the exact same time. So who are
his influences? Because we know about the Tuba
and the Eagles, but where did the synths and
the darkness come from? Gary Newman is a huge
one. Reznor said hearing the song Cars was a
revelation. He knew instantly that he wanted
to work with synthesizers. And Depeche Mode,
of course. Specifically their album Black Celebration.
Reznor called seeing them live on that tour a
spiritual experience. I can totally hear that.
That dark, moody, electronic pop is definitely
in the DNA of Pretty Hate Machine. But then you
have the rock side. He cites the band Rush, specifically
their Signals album, as teaching him that keyboards
could belong in hard rock, that they weren't
just for pop music. And then you get into the
really experimental stuff. Coil, Shrob and Gristle,
and especially the Canadian band Skinny Puppy.
Oh, he's talked about Skinny Puppy a lot. He
has. He's actually admitted that his first hit,
Down In It, was basically a total ripoff of Skinny
Puppy's song, Dig It. He was very open about
his influences. At least he's honest about it.
And his own legacy of influence is massive. David
Bowie compared Nine Inch Nails to the Velvet
Underground in terms of their impact. Axl Rose
was heavily listening to Reznor while making
the long -delayed Guns N' Roses album Chinese
Democracy. Artists like Angun and Stephen Wilson
both cite the album The Fragile as a life -changing
record for them. He shaped the sound of a whole
generation. So to bring this all together, we
started with a lonely kid in the cornfields of
Pennsylvania who just wanted to escape. He played
tuba. He loved the Eagles. He waxed floors to
get free studio time. He fought addiction. He
fought his manager in court. He fought the record
labels on stage. And he won. That's the incredible
thing. When you look back at all these battles,
he won. He won all of them. He really did. He's
an Oscar winner, an Emmy winner, a father of
five. And he's still making edgy, relevant art
into his late 50s. It raises a really provocative
thought for me looking back at this whole journey.
We usually look at an artist's masterpiece as
a specific album. For Reznor, it would be The
Downward Spiral, The Fragile. But looking at
this whole stack of sources, I wonder if Trent
Reznor's greatest masterpiece isn't an album
at all. What is it then? I think it's his career
itself. It's the way he engineered a life. Think
about it. He took the self -loathing and the
profound isolation of his youth and he transmuted
it into art. He then survived the total collapse
of the music industry in the 2000s and came out
ahead of the labels. And then he transitioned
from being a rock star, a job with a very short,
self -destructive shelf life, to being a composer,
a respected job you can do until you're 90 years
old. That is a fascinating way to look at it.
He didn't just survive the machine. He rebuilt
the machine to work for him. Exactly. He proved
that you can grow up without selling out. You
can evolve from that angry kid without losing
your artistic edge. His masterpiece is the life
he built. Well, on that note, we're going to
wrap up this deep dive. Whether you're listening
to the downward spiral or the social network
score later today, maybe listen a little closer.
There's a lot of history and a lot of struggle
and strategy in those notes. Thanks for listening.