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Michael Trent Reznor (born May 17, 1965) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, record producer, and composer. He serves as the lead vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and principal songwriter of the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, which he founded in 1988 and of which he was the sole official member until 2016. The first Nine Inch Nails album, Pretty Hate Machine (1989), was a commercial and critical success. Reznor has since released 11 more Nine Inch Nails studio albums. Reznor began his career in the mid-1980s as a member of synth-pop bands such as Option 30, The Innocent, and Exotic Birds. He has contributed to the albums of artists such as Marilyn Manson, whom he mentored, rapper Saul Williams and Halsey. Alongside his wife Mariqueen Maandig and long-time Nine Inch Nails collaborators Atticus Ross and Rob Sheridan, he formed the post-industrial group How to Destroy Angels in 2009. Beginning in 2010, Reznor, alongside Atticus Ross, began to work on film and television scores. The duo have scored many of David Fincher's films, including The Social Network (2010), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Gone Girl (2014), Mank (2020), and The Killer (2023). They won the Academy Award for Best Original Score and the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media for both The Social Network (2010) and Soul (2020). The duo has also scored the films Patriots Day (2016), Mid90s, Bird Box (both 2018), Waves (2019), Bones and All, Empire of Light (both 2022), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023), and Challengers (2024). They have scored the documentaries Before the Flood (2016) and The Vietnam War (2017), and the TV series Watchmen (2019), winning a Primetime Emmy Award for the lattermost. In 1997, Reznor appeared on Time's list of the year's most influential people, and Spin magazine described him as "the most vital artist in music". Early life Michael Trent Reznor was born in New Castle, Pennsylvania, on May 17, 1965, the son of Nancy Lou (née Clark) and Michael Reznor. He is of German and Irish descent, and grew up in Mercer, Pennsylvania. His great-grandfather, George Reznor, founded the heating and air conditioning manufacturer Reznor Company in 1884. After his parents divorced when he was six years old, Reznor's sister Tera lived with their mother while he went to live with his maternal grandparents. He began playing the piano at the age of 12 and showed an early aptitude for music. His grandfather told People in February 1995, "[Reznor] was a good kid [...] a Boy Scout who loved to skateboard, build model planes, and play the piano. Music was his life, from the time he was a wee boy. He was so gifted." Reznor has acknowledged that his sheltered life left him feeling isolated from the outside world. In a September 1994 interview with Rolling Stone, he said of his career choices, "I don't know why I want to do these things, other than my desire to escape from Small Town, U.S.A., 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. My life experience came from watching movies, watching TV and reading books and looking at magazines. And when your culture comes from watching TV every day, you're bombarded with images of things that seem cool, places that seem interesting, people who have jobs and careers and opportunities. None of that happened where I was. You're almost taught to realize it's not for you." However, in April 1995, he told Details that he did not "want to give the impression it was a miserable childhood". Reznor would later recall, "The first concert I ever saw was the Eagles in 1976. The excitement of the night struck a chord with me and I remember thinking, 'Someday I'd love to be up on that stage.'" At Mercer Area Junior/Senior High School, he learned to play the tenor saxophone and tuba, and was a member of both the jazz band and marching band. The school's former band director remembered him as "very upbeat and friendly". He became involved in theater while in high school, being awarded the "Best in Drama" accolade by his classmates for his roles as Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar and Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man. He graduated in 1983 and enrolled at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania, where he studied computer engineering. Career Early projects While still in high school, Reznor joined local band Option 30 and played three shows a week with them. After a year of college, he dropped out to pursue a career in music in Cleveland, Ohio. His first band in Cleveland was the Urge, a cover band. In 1985, he joined The Innocent as a keyboardist; they released one album, Livin' in the Street, but Reznor left the band after three months. In 1986, he joined local band Exotic Birds and appeared with them as a fictional band called The Problems in the 1987 film Light of Day. During this time, Reznor also contributed on keyboards to the band Slam Bamboo and briefly joined the new wave band Lucky Pierre. Reznor got a job at Cleveland's Right Track Studio as an assistant engineer and janitor. Studio owner Bart Koster later commented, "He is so focused in everything he does. When that guy waxed the floor, it looked great." Reznor asked Koster for permission to record demos of his own songs for free during unused studio time. Koster agreed, remarking that it cost him "just a little wear on [his] tape heads". Nine Inch Nails While assembling the earliest Nine Inch Nails recordings, Reznor was unable to find a band that could articulate his songs as he wanted. Instead, inspired by Prince, he played all the instruments except drums himself. He continued in this role on most Nine Inch Nails studio recordings, though he has occasionally involved other musicians, assistants, drummers, and rhythm experts. Several labels responded favorably to the demo material, and Reznor signed with TVT Records. Nine selections from the Right Track demos were unofficially released years later in 1994 as Purest Feeling and many of these songs appeared in revised form on Pretty Hate Machine, Reznor's first official release under the Nine Inch Nails name. Pretty Hate Machine was released in 1989 and was a moderate commercial success, certified Gold in 1992. Amid pressure from his record label to produce a follow-up to Pretty Hate Machine, Reznor secretly began recording under various pseudonyms to avoid record company interference, resulting in an EP called Broken (1992). Nine Inch Nails was included in the Lollapalooza tour in the summer of 1991, and won a Grammy Award in 1993 under "Best Heavy Metal Performance" for the song "Wish". Nine Inch Nails' second full-length album, The Downward Spiral, entered the Billboard 200 chart in 1994 at number two, and remains the highest-selling Nine Inch Nails release in America. To record the album, Reznor rented and moved into the 10050 Cielo Drive mansion, where the Tate–LaBianca murders had been perpetrated by t.... Discover the Leah Trent popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Leah Trent books.