The Nine Inch Nails album Trent Reznor thought has no focus: “I was afraid about what was happening”
Most artists have a clear vision or goal when creating their records, whether it’s crafting a cohesive set of songs that flow together or simply producing a collection of standout tracks that people will enjoy. It’s often about making the entire album work as a unified body of work, rather than just a series of disconnected singles. While Trent Reznor, the mastermind behind Nine Inch Nails, was known for his meticulous approach to crafting albums with a strong thematic or conceptual backbone, he admitted that The Fragile lacked the focus he had initially intended.
To understand why Reznor was so despondent, though, you’ve got to walk in his shoes for a few minutes. His debut with Pretty Hate Machine already set the world on fire, but even though he thought that hitting the big time would help calm his rage and loneliness, all it did was make it ten times worse when he went into making his next albums like The Downward Spiral.
Even though that record may as well be classified as ‘anti-commercial’, it didn’t matter to the hardcore fans eating it up. Reznor had tried his hardest to make an uncompromising suicide note of a record, but even when the dust settled, people were still happy to hear ‘Closer’ on the radio whenever it came on.
So, if darkness was what they wanted, that was exactly what Reznor would give them. If Broken was the darkest that he had ever gone, The Fragile was the kind of aftermath-style companion piece to The Downward Spiral, replacing the harsh abstract cover of the former with something almost clinically clean.
But aside from a few embarrassing moments like on ‘Starfuckers Inc’, this is one of the more openhearted records that Reznor ever made. It’s still far from the easiest listen, but no one could have expected the same person who sang about wanting to stoop the lowest a human being could possibly go would eventually write a tune like ‘We’re In This Together’.
However, it is a double album, and like all massive undertakings before it, Reznor said that he didn’t feel that comfortable with it in retrospect, saying to Spin, “The Fragile was an album based a lot in fear, because I was afraid as fuck about what was happening to me. That’s why there aren’t a lot of lyrics on that record. I couldn’t fucking think. An unimaginable amount of effort went into that record in a very unfocused way.”
It’s hard to listen to Reznor in that borderline manic state listening to this album, but the further you go down the tracklisting, the more it strengthens the record. A lot of the album feels like it’s completely unhinged, but there’s no doubt by the end that Reznor is showing every piece of his mind and letting his audience figure out what it means to them instead of making some kind of grand statement.
Could it afford to have a few fewer tracks and be scaled down to a proper single album? Sure, but that would also defeat the entire purpose of the album. This was meant to be the unravelling of the character from The Downward Spiral, and despite it having some dark back pages, it’s probably the closest that any Nine Inch Nails fan will get to knowing Reznor on that intimate a level.
