“After six listens”: Trent Reznor’s favourite new wave record
Some albums hit you like a splash of cold water, leaving you proclaiming, ‘This is the greatest record in the world!’—only to be forgotten days later. Then there are those that do the opposite—the ones that slowly seep into your psyche like love. Trent Reznor has always aimed for the latter. And how could you not, once your brain’s been rattled by the sustained impact of a slow burn?
When a young, presentable Reznor first started to play the piano at the age of 12 in 1977, new emerging sounds were beginning to make the timeless instrument look old hat. You had punk, for the most part, sticking to stringed instruments that could be smashed up easily, and you had disco trying to downscale the keys to a synthesised sound.
But Reznor was a lad with his head screwed on, and even at a young age, he knew a technical grounding was essential to walk before you started to run. As his grandfather, Bill Clark, once said: “[Reznor] was a good kid. […] a Boy Scout who loved to skateboard, build model planes, and play piano. Music was his life, from the time he was a wee boy. He was so gifted.”
That wee boy also had the gift of an eye for the zeitgeist. Part of the reason for that was because he was separated from it by geography. As Reznor told Rolling Stone himself about his upbringing: “I don’t know why I want to do these things, other than my desire to escape from Small Town, USA, to dismiss the boundaries, to explore. It isn’t a bad place where I grew up, but there was nothing going on but the cornfields.”
And in 1980, there was nothing more expansive than Talking Heads’ epic Remain in Light. It certainly obliterated the borders of Reznor’s hometown of Mercer, Pennsylvania, when he first heard it. And it has been a bright beacon of possibilities ever since. “One of my absolutely favourite records is Remain In Light by the Talking Heads,” Reznor told Vinyl Writers.
Arriving at a point when he was just getting to grips with the technical side of music and finding a gauge on pop, he says that he “didn’t understand” it when he first listened to the jagged and busy sounds of a band singing about things other than sex and dancing. He wasn’t alone. “Back then, I was living in a rural small town that was widely cut off from interesting culture,” he says. How was he supposed to interpret a prescient Bolshevistic look at the insularity of capitalist realism framed within the polyrhythms of Afrobeat?
But there was enough to grab him and say, ‘No, stick with this’. Soon, he’d be posing similar questions with Nine Inch Nails, but without Talking Heads, that might not have been the case. “Suddenly,” he continues, “This album landed. A strange, synthetic, polyrhythmical piece of art with African influences which confused me in every way.”
Remain in Light confused the world in many ways, only reaching 19th in the US chart. “With good albums it is the case that at the beginning you don’t know what you are actually dealing with,” Reznor says. “But you are fascinated by it, and with about six listens it slowly reveals itself to you. With the tenth listen, you are completely thrilled, but even when you listen for the 30th time, you still discover something new.” That’s an outlook that Reznor endeavours to follow—slaving over fine details.
As he concludes: “Remain In Light taught me that. The record enlightened and changed me. It showed me what music can do, how song structures can look like, or how drum parts can interact with other parts. Since I started making music myself, this wonderful album has been something I can always consult. The great thing is that the record can still be approached from so many different directions without losing its puzzles.”
