With this latest record, Reznor tried something that most artists have been doing all along: writing demos. I thought, ‘Let’s only put in what is absolutely necessary. So I wanted to kind of strip it down, and I realized I felt comfortable not fitting a lot of layers of stuff in. And it wasn’t caught up in the glitz and glamour of production bells and whistles, which I myself have embraced at times in the past. It felt like the spirit of a human being conveying an emotional message was there in those things. And the records I found myself listening to while doing this record-like old Gang of Four records, Stooges, Iggy Pop-felt fresh, felt dangerous, felt underproduced. “And I didn’t do this record to be the opposite of The Fragile, although it kind of came out that way. “I wasn’t doing anything consciously to react to what I thought sucked around me,” he continues. I can’t tell the difference between a lot of it because it all sounds correct. To my ears, if you turn on the radio, a lot sounds like it could all be the same band. The downside that can come from that is, now everybody can chop drums to be perfectly in time and tune vocals to be right in, and there are all kinds of great-sounding expensive reverb programs, and everybody has got all this stuff. I think the great thing about technology becoming cheap and affordable and able to be obtained by anyone is that it’s really put a lot of power in a lot of people’s hands. “And one was, I’ve grown tired of the sort of perfect-sounding records that are easy to make these days. “There were a few rules going into it that I kind of had in place,” Reznor says. On With Teeth, Reznor challenges his listeners with a record on which performance and emotion are held in a higher regard than exploiting every nuance of today’s production palette. Gone is the feeling that every hi-hat tick was agonized over for months and programmed under a microscope. Gone are the careful, almost symphonic transitions from one song to the next. What is new is Reznor’s approach to creating music. But the band’s draw on the tour circuit and its ability to crack the singles charts is nothing new. And the leadoff single, “The Hand That Feeds,” a politically charged new-wave romp, instantly became of the most downloaded songs on the planet-before and after its official release. Tickets to the first leg of the band’s spring tour sold out around the world in a matter of minutes, prompting the immediate booking of a more ambitious, arena-size tour in the fall. Surprisingly, the time off has done little to damage his popularity. "I needed to address some issues, and I had to get my life in order, and that took some time." "The reality of it was, I just wasn’t in a place in my life where I was ready to put out a record quickly," Reznor explains. Suffice it to say, for any musician of note, six years out of the public eye is seldom a good idea. Six years is longer than most people serve in prison for armed robbery. Six years is longer than the entire career of most bands. His latest Nine Inch Nails album, With Teeth (Interscope, 2005), is only the fifth proper release of his career, and it marks the end of a six-year recording hiatus. Every few years, Reznor’s work seems to come out of nowhere, burn brightly in contrast to whatever the musical climate happens to be and then fade into the background just as quickly as it appeared. Trent Reznor operates on a timeline that’s probably more suited to orbiting celestial bodies than being the front man of a hugely successful band.
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