chase the light

A few years ago, George and I were sitting at Damiano’s on Fairfax one late night and Trent Reznor walks in and goes to the back room. Hmmm… interesting. Then sometime last year we’re at the Viper Room to see Riz and his band Anyone play and there ya go, Trent Reznor comes walking in to check out the band. Earlier this year, and a first by any band, he released The Hand That Feeds and Only as Protools and Garageband multitrack files on his website. He wanted to put the songs in the hands of his fans and let them hack away at them by remixing them and screwing around with them as they see fit. Then Steve calls me up and asks if I want to hit the Nine Inch Nails show at the Hollywood Bowl in October. Man, it’s very Nine Inch Naily ’round ‘ere. Trent and I have become very close, he just doesn’t know it.

So, my take on The Hand That Feeds [LINK] was that is was too fast and not evil enough. You could actually work out in the gym to the original version. I wanted something more Sabbathy with creepy shit coming in and out of it. A couple of years ago Steve and I, and Matt also, caught Marilyn Manson at San Jose State’s arena and we joked the whole show how under the stage there was a giant Evil Machine?¢‚Äû¬¢ that when fired up would produce copius amounts of evil. Whenever Marilyn Manson got particularly heavy and grindy sounding we would look at each other and yell stuff like, “You hear that? That’s evil… pure evil! They’re really cranking the Evil Machine?¢‚Äû¬¢ right now!!”. I think we laughed through the whole show at how insanely good Marilyn Manson actually was. Of course now when I try to describe what’s lacking in a song I sometimes say it needs more evil. “Hey, have you heard that new Cold Play song? Yeah, it’s cool and all, but it could use more evil“. So here’s my take on it being more evily and heavy with less Jane Fonda. A vintage Evil Machine?¢‚Äû¬¢ can go for huge amounts of money on EBay so I did my best with what I had.