Every working day, Trent Reznor travels from his home, a white-walled farmhouse in a canyon on the west side of Los Angeles, to the studio he in-built his backyard. There he meets his best friend, bandmate and business partner, Atticus Ross, and they get to work. Reznor and Ross work the identical hours, Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. “We are coming,” Reznor told me. “We weren’t late. We’re not coming here to fuck around. It’s a methodical, orderly existence that Reznor couldn’t have predicted in the 1990s, when he was playing in Nine Inch Nails and struggling with the drug and alcohol problems that were his formula for success. “I would do anything to avoid writing a song,” Reznor said. “I would re-wire the studio 50 times.”
Now Reznor has a wife, Mariqueen Maandig, five children and many roles. He’s sober. Since 2010, when director David Fincher asked Reznor and Ross to rating Social network, for which Reznor and Ross won an Oscar, each men have regular employment composing for movies. This 12 months, Reznor and Ross are also launching With Teeth, a company built around storytelling across multiple disciplines: film production, fashion, a music festival, and a enterprise with Epic Games.
Then, after all, there’s Reznor’s oldest and perhaps still most complex job: being the frontman of Nine Inch Nails. In 1988, Reznor then formed a one-man band; the primary two full-length albums released by Nine Inch Nails, Nice hate machine (1989) i Downward spiral (1994) sold over 8 million copies. (Over the next years and subsequent albums, the band surpassed the 20 million sales mark.) For a while within the Nineties, Nine Inch Nails was ubiquitous: a phenomenon on the extent of Nirvana or Dr. Dre. During this decade, the band’s success almost killed Reznor. “I didn’t feel prepared for how disorienting it was,” he said. “How much this can distort your personality.”
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Now Nine Inch Nails, which Ross joined as a full-time member in 2016, presents a different problem – how do you make something old, something already so well-defined, recent again? There are years when Reznor looks like he knows the answers and years when he’s less sure. He suspended the band’s activities greater than once; after Nine Inch Nails’ last tour in 2022, Reznor deliberately took a break from playing live shows as well. “For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t sure: What was this tour going to be about?” Reznor told me. “What do I have to say now? We can still play those songs really well. Perhaps we will be able to create a new production. But he didn’t shout at me: this is what I have to do now.
But he and Ross still come to work every day in search of transcendence. “We sit here every day,” Reznor said. “And part of the time organically is just reflecting on who we are as people, processing life and having a sort of therapy session. And during those endless hours, the question arose: Why do we want to do this? And the reason is that we both feel most united with God and fulfilled.”
It’s easy to do something if you’re a teenager growing up in rural Pennsylvania, near the Ohio border, as Reznor was, and you have nothing to lose and everything to gain; it’s much harder when you become old and find a way to make things that folks like to keep going. It’s an old story: the act of creation can lift you up, but those sharp gifts also can tear you down, and when you can get through that, the sheer blissful regularity of living with money and family can realign you so completely that there isn’t any friction there anymore, with which might be used to work. You look in the cabinet and find it empty, or it’s a mansion where someone who bores you lives, so that you stop looking. But Reznor and Ross never stopped searching and trying to find that magical feeling of finding something— that feeling, in Reznor’s words: “I do not know where it got here from. I do not know the way I managed to do what I did, but I turned it into something that worked” continues to be what organizes their days and moods.
Credit : www.gq.com
