I’ve been buying your albums since 1992. I remember the first time I heard Pretty Hate Machine. I was 13 years old and my best friend Tom came over with two CD’s. Black Sheep and Pretty Hate Machine. He played PHM and I was immediately in heaven. This was the kind of music I was looking for. It was time for all that early 90’s rap to end. MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice and all that other preteen crap we listened to for some reason, it was now out the window. Pretty Hate Machine marked the beginning of my teenage venture into music appreciation.

I remember asking Tom to replay Ringfinger. That song alone stood out to me most for some reason.

Strangely enough PHM was not the first Nine Inch Nails CD I bought. It was Fixed that was my first NIN disc. I guess I knew I could borrow PHM from Tom anytime I wanted. Although I did later purchase it at some point in High School.

I’ve been listening to your music now for 20 years. Wow 20 years! That’s 2/3rds of my life.

There is so much I could get into. For instance my first real concert was Nine Inch Nails with PWEI and Jim Rose Circus on New Years Eve 1994/95 in Auburn Hills at the Palace. What an awesome first concert! By then you were big on the scene because radio stations were playing Closer all over the country. A lot of those people came to that concert because of that song. People used to do that, they used to come to concerts to hear a band play that one song they liked on the radio. I never understood that. There wasn’t one NIN song I didn’t like. My friends and I were huge fans. When you guys played Burn we were laughing at all the jocks in the audience who went from being all excited to all confused, having never heard the song.

I still love your work. Even after all these years you continue to make exceptional stuff. You are like a modern day Mozart.

I was thrilled to see you win an Oscar last year for scoring the Social Network. That was awesome. I literally got to watch a guy I grew up with enjoying, go from being some obscure industrial electronic composer into a well respected main stream film score composer. It was pretty surreal because film is my thing. Since that same age I started listening to your work, I also discovered my love for filmmaking. So to see my favorite musician get into film score work was as I said, surreal. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dreamed of using your music in some film I would make one day. I used to write scripts to your music all the time.

Anyway. I just wanted to say thank you for 20 years of awesome stuff and hope you continue to keep rocking it. BTW, The Fragile remains my favorite of all your albums. Most of my friends and I would agree that it was your masterpiece. A truly remarkable album that should go down in history as one of the greatest albums of the twentieth century.

The Great Below – The Fragile (left disc)