From the magazine: ISSUE 88, October/November 2013

Trent Reznor owes his success in the past quarter century as much to his music as to his meticulously maintained image: the strong-headed iconoclast intent on doing it his way. But behind the prickly interviews and somber façade lies a far more nuanced individual. By talking with many of Reznor’s friends and collaborators from over the years, we thought we’d retell his story through the eyes of the people closest to him. What emerges is an artist who crafts some of his era’s rawest albums while maintaining a cool aura of inscrutability, a dogged musician with limitless stores of energy and an icon who has never stopped evolving.

ANDREA MULRAIN

Former Atlantic Records A&R, college girlfriend

Trent stood out from the crowd. Allegheny College was very conservative and preppy. There was no hipster/indie scene at all. He was pretty much the only person who had a distinctive style. He was like a mod or a new-waver. He used to wear parachute pants, and this was back in the ’80s, that whole MTV era. He looked like he had just stepped out of a video.

I approached him one night. We were queueing up for dinner, and I said, “Hi, are you from New York?” And he said, “No, I’m from Mercer, but thanks for the compliment.” That was the beginning of our friendship. Within a day or two, I noticed a flyer for his band, Option 30. They were playing downtown. I gathered a bunch of my girlfriends, we went down to see the band, and I was just instantly blown away. He was so charismatic, and he put on such a great show—it was obvious to me that this kid had a lot of talent. The next day was my birthday, and he showed up at my dorm room with a bunch of Twinkies with candles in them and sang “Happy Birthday,” which I thought was very endearing. It’s hard to imagine Trent Reznor doing something like that, but when I knew him he had a very playful personality. He was a big practical joker.

Within a few months, he realized that he wasn’t really connecting and integrating well into collegiate life. For somebody that young—he was only 18—he had a lot going on. He was constantly practicing, tinkering with his electronics—he had one of the first Memorymoogs in America. He was throwing himself into his music to the exclusion of his studies. In the end, he couldn’t keep up with both. Gradually, he extricated himself from campus. While he was gone the following year, he sent me flowers on Valentine’s Day. He dropped in unannounced once, and I’ll never forget this: he had his dad’s sports car and he surprised me, picked me up and whisked me away. We went out on this wild ride with the top down. It was something out of a Tom Cruise movie.

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Having dropped out after his freshman year of college, Reznor relocated to Cleveland to pursue a music career.

BART KOSTER

Former owner of Cleveland’s now-defunct Right Track Studios

I was building a studio and brought Trent on before I even moved into the building. He was working at a place I used to frequent called Pi Keyboards and Audio, selling equipment. Trent was articulate; he was funny. We were both big fans of David Lynch. Trent had a lot of skills as far as working with equipment and keyboards, which is why I thought it would be a pretty painless transition to engineering. He picked up on it right away. As a matter of fact, he was teaching a recording engineering class after not too long. Every now and then, I run into somebody and they go, “You know, Trent recorded my first record.” Trent’s first gold record wasn’t even his own—it was a recording he did of a group called Troop.