You write something down and you go, ‘Fuck. just scraping my fucking soul.’ Exploring areas of your brain that you don’t want to go to, that’s painful. I was like, ‘I just want to get back on the road because I hate sitting in a room trying to, trying to. He later said: “I just wanted to kill myself. But the process was different for him, and soon his new record company, Interscope, were expressing ‘concern’ at the amount of time the album seemed to be taking to make. Reznor cited the example of Nirvana, who had gone into the studio and made Nevermind in two weeks. The original intention had been to make the album quickly. The album was more of a struggle to make than he expected. But the constant pressure from fans, the media, admirers and other bands asking when the new album was out, how it was going, what it would be like, what the songs would be, started to take their toll. Pretty Hate Machine and Broken had, in a sense, both been produced in secret. The expectations for The Downward Spiral were almost crippling. It was just me, bored, trying to come up with something I kind of wanted to set the parameters to work within, to focus more.” “There’s records, although they may appear dated today, that try to do things that are more exciting to me than, ‘Here’s my video track and here’s my dance song and here’s my power ballad.’ All that kind of disposability. But some of the records that influenced me a lot on this album, like Low and even The Wall – I’m sure I’m ripping off Pink Floyd. “It is personal experiences, but it’s wrapped up in the highly pretentious idea of a record with some sort of theme or flow to ’em, and it was meant to be. This provided the conceptual backbone for the songs. Reznor had been keeping notes on his inner state since his chaotic booze-and-chemical-fuelled stint on Lollapalooza. While The Downward Spiral was not planned as a concept album, there are linking themes and recurring motifs in the songs. Reznor had moved into the house made famous by the Charles Manson murders. They wrote in her blood the words ‘Pig’ and ‘Healter Skelter’ (sic) on the walls and door. Then they killed Sharon, ripping the unborn baby boy from her womb. In the space of an hour Sharon watched as they slaughtered three of her friends in front of her. One sultry night in August 1969, while the heavily pregnant Sharon and her friends were turning in for the night, a group of hippies broke in. The house had had some famous tenants in the past, most notably disgraced film director Roman Polanski his young wife, actress Sharon Tate, back in the 60s. Reznor found a ranch-style bungalow to rent on Cielo Drive in the Hollywood Hills, a beautiful, picturesque location set in the super-rich part of Los Angeles populated by movie executives, actors and musicians. The location Reznor wanted had to be sufficiently isolated, and large enough to accommodate the gear and any collaborators, like producer Flood and his main collaborator/assistant, drummer Chris Vrenna, whose job was to sift through hundreds of videos for samples to be used on the album. One of the beauties of digital recording is that it can really be done anywhere. Rather than just putting the band in the studio, recording the instruments and mixing it together, sounds were recorded and stored on a computer hard drive rather than on tape, and they could then be digitally altered. The Downward Spiral was one of the first albums to be recorded entirely using state-of-the-art digital technology. He wanted a property where he could set up his own recording studio. He had just signed a deal with Interscope that gave him the artistic freedom he needed to work on his third album. “I hate sending a new song out: ‘I just cut my soul open – check it out. Those appealed largely to a cult market, the still-thriving industrial underground.īut by the time he made The Downward Spiral in 1994, the 'mainstream' of metal – under the influence of everyone from Rage Against The Machine and Nirvana to post-Black album Metallica – was moving towards where Trent Reznor had already staked out his territory. The abrasive follow-up (of sorts), Broken, introduced distorted guitars and a metal sensibility. Nine Inch Nails' debut album Pretty Hate Machine, recorded in 1988, was essentially an electronic work heavily influenced by Skinny Puppy, Ministry And Depeche Mode, with Reznor as a one-man band, creating all the songs and sounds in the studio. It's almost as if the album has kept on growing and changing, updating itself between plays. Even today you can listen to The Downward Spiral and still discover things that you had never heard before.
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