The Power of Negative Thinking.

• Author: PARELES, JON
• Position: Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails - Interview

Trent Reznor, the master of Nine Inch Nails, had everything he ever dreamed of. So why was he so miserable?

Trent Reznor's smile seemed out of place, but not to him. "Everyone has this impression of me that I'm morose," he complains. An interviewer points out that the albums he has made as Nine Inch Nails over the last decade are saturated in despair. "Point taken," he says.

Reznor, 34, is doing interviews in a New York City hotel room, sipping what is clearly not his first cup of coffee. Dressed in a black (of course) shirt and olive pants, clean-shaven with jet-black hair, he explains how five years went by between The Downward Spiral and Nine Inch Nails' new album, The Fragile. Two years were spent on tour, including Nine Inch Nails' mudspattered appearance at Woodstock '94. Reznor worked as a producer: on Marilyn Manson's Antichrist Superstar, on soundtrack music for Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers and David Lynch's Lost Highway, on video-game sounds for "Quake." He moved to New Orleans and built Nothing Studios in a former funeral home. And he procrastinated.

"I was tired of exposing myself," he says. "With Nine Inch Nails, it was stuff out of my journal and the way I really felt about things that gave it its power. There wasn't a persona or a character in between that and me--it was me.

INNERMOST FEELINGS EXPOSED

"It's one thing when you're sitting in your bedroom thinking, `No one will hear this.' And then, after several years, millions of people have bought those records and now they think they know you, and in a weird way they do, because that's my innermost feelings laid out. I didn't want to share myself in that way anymore."

The album and tour left Reznor rich, famous, and clinically depressed.

"We started at one level, we ended at another," he says. "I've got everything I ever dreamed I could have. I've got some respect, I've got the bank account, I've got the studio. I think I have friends, whatever they are, though I was wrong about that. I gave up me as a person, as a human, to dedicate myself to this thing, and it worked. And I'm miserable. And then I disliked myself more for feeling that way: What's wrong with you? What are you whining about? You're the luckiest guy in the world to have this situation, and you're really, really unhappy."

PRESSURE NOT TO FAIL

Meanwhile, fans were growing impatient for a sequel to The Downward Spiral, and with Nine Inch Nails' silence, expectations and rumors grew. "I realized I was...