Trent Reznor
Trent Reznor
Michael Trent Reznor, known professionally as Trent Reznor, is an American singer-songwriter, record producer, and film score composer. As a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, he is best known as the founder and principal songwriter of industrial rock project Nine Inch Nails. His first release under this pseudonym, the 1989 album Pretty Hate Machine, was a commercial and critical success. He has since released eight studio albums. He left Interscope Records in 2007 and was an independent recording artist until signing with...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth17 May 1965
CityMercer, PA
CountryUnited States of America
I'm sure there is a group of people that assume Nine Inch Nails is just noise and chaos - or whatever it might be dismissed as, and sometimes is.
My input for the first 16, 17 years of my life was AM radio, FM radio - pretty mainstream stuff. Rolling Stone was probably as edgy as it got.
Schoolwork came easy to me. I learned to play piano effortlessly. I was coasting.
When fame presented itself to me, I was not at a point in my life where I was equipped to deal with it.
When I was 25, people used to say to me that having kids would change you, and I'd roll my eyes.
I lived a fairly average, anonymous small-town life till I got the idea to do Nine Inch Nails. Then I locked myself in a studio for a year, and then got off the tour bus two years after that, and I didn't know who I'd turned into.
I often find myself listening to a record because a lot of people or magazines have told me it's good and I'm supposed to like it, and I try to stay in touch with what's happening and I'm also a fan of music. I find myself trying to like something that I really don't think is that great.
In 2010, aside from that niche of music that I have no interest in - Black Eyed Peas territory, disposable pop stuff - there's almost an incentive to go back to making music as adventurous and groundbreaking as you can, because nobody gets a big hit anymore.
It's easy to get lost in the shuffle, and just enticing people to hear the music for free doesn't mean that much when everyone else is essentially doing the same thing on MySpace, or wherever.
After coming from a major label, I realized the entire business has been decimated, and you can't look to labels to try to figure it out because they don't even use the technology, and they're oblivious to how people consume music these days.
I think the reason I was 23 before I ever wrote a song was that I was afraid of testing myself. What would I do if I discovered I didn't have anything to say?
The 'Downward Spiral' album was a record all about beating everybody up - and then 'Hurt' was like a coda saying maybe I shouldn't have done that. But to make the song sound impenetrable because I thought it was a little too vulnerable, I tried to layer it in noise.
Being in a band with my wife, I'm very aware of the multitude of ways that can go wrong. We're best friends and are interested in the same things, so it's natural to make music together.
It's one thing to sit back and say, 'Hey let's play a club, that will be great,' but then you get there and say, 'Hey wait, this is the dressing room? Where's my dressing room?'