Nine Inch Nails was born out of Cleveland, Ohio, with me and a friend in a studio working on demos at night. Got a record deal with a small, little label, went on tour in a van, and a couple years later found that somehow we touched a nerve, and that first record resonated with a bunch of people.

The first set of lyrics for the first songs I ever wrote, which are the ones on 'Pretty Hate Machine,' came from private journal entries that I realized I was writing in lyric form.

I like the idea of working in an album-sized chunk, you know, and I never looked at Nine Inch Nails as a project that would be a hit-driven, single-based kind of thing.

Trent Reznor Quotes