Illustration by Ana Mouriño
Trent Reznor is the mastermind behind Nine Inch Nails, an industrial rock band whose instant classic Pretty Hate Machine debuted with a roar in 1989.
Reznor, who has struggled with depression and social anxiety, is a notorious alcoholic and addict, and he writes about it in his music.
I chose the Nine Inch Nails song “Hurt” as the number-one song about addiction in a list published last year.
I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that’s real
The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything
And Trent’s “Down In It” is also the number-three song about bipolar disorder. While it is unclear whether or not Reznor is bipolar, the lyrics to “Down In It” suggest a connection:
Kinda like a cloud I was up, way up in the sky
And I was feeling some feelings you wouldn’t believe
Sometimes I don’t believe them myself
And I decided I was never coming down
Just then a tiny little dot caught my eye
It was just about too small to see
But I watched it way too long
It was pulling me down
I was up above it
Now I’m down in it
Industrial music is like heavy metal’s alternative-rock stepchild. It’s just as aggressive but features electronic drums and sometimes keyboards — or, in Reznor’s case, live piano. It’s angry without the machismo that comes with the territory of metal.
Despite the fact that it is not metal, Reznor won a Grammy Award for Best Heavy Metal Performance for the song “Wish” in 1993, which appeared on the EP Broken.
It was after the band’s 1994 follow-up, The Downward Spiral, that Reznor stooped to the lowest points of his addiction. He was addicted to heroin.
“[It] felt like I had an unending bottomless pit of rage and self-loathing inside me and I had to somehow challenge something or I’d explode,” he told The Guardian. “I thought I could get through by putting everything into my music, standing in front of an audience and screaming emotions at them from my guts… but after a while it didn’t sustain itself, and other things took over — drugs and alcohol.”
For Nine Inch Nails’ music, Reznor has taken center stage, with a revolving door of talent alternating with each tour and album. From 1995 to 1996, Reznor even teamed up with fellow-addict David Bowie for the Outside Tour.
“I was nearing the peak of my addiction, and his role to me was kind of mentor, big brother, friend,” Reznor said of Bowie in The Guardian. “And also he’d give me kind of shamanish advice.”
But even with Bowie as mentor, Reznor’s cocaine and heroin use continued several more years.
After a failed attempt at rehab, Reznor went on to overdose on china white heroin, which he mistook for cocaine in 2000. He cleaned up his act at a New Orleans rehab the following year.
“I needed to get my priorities straight, my head screwed on,” Reznor said in a 2005 interview with the UK music mag Kerrang! “Instead of always working, I took a couple of years off, just to figure out who I was and working out if I wanted to keep doing this or not. I had become a terrible addict; I needed to get my shit together.”
And since then, he’s had quite the renaissance, having been more productive now than ever in his life. He’s put out five albums and found a second job in scoring music for films.
Even before cleaning up, Reznor was no stranger to soundtracking. He’d composed music used in the 1996 PC video game Quake and scored the David Lynch movie Lost Highway, as well as Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. But it’s now a bona fide career for him.
And it was The Social Network – 2010’s blockbuster drama about Facebook – that earned Reznor an Academy Award for Best Original Score along with collaborator Atticus Ross. He has since scored the Ben Affleck flick Gone Girl.
Reznor is now married with two sons, aged 6 and 5. He became the chief operating officer for the streaming music service Beats, which is owned by Dr. Dre and Interscope’s Jimmy Iovine. He still tours as Nine Inch Nails, having headlined the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago in 2003 and going on a world tour behind 2013’s Hesitation Marks. Reznor tells Consequence of Sound the band will return in 2016.
“Right now I’m feeling inspired. An unexpected side effect of getting sober [14] years ago was I’m motivated: I feel like I’ve lost some time and I want to make up for that,” he told Fast Company. “Getting sober and getting my life in order has really changed my perspective on the creative process. “
Keep cranking out the music, Trent. And stay sober. You’re on a roll.
Enjoy some Nine Inch Nails music videos below…
