Every weekday, Trent Reznor makes his way from his house, a cottagey sprawl behind a white wall in a canyon on Los Angeles’s Westside, to a studio he’s built in his backyard. There he meets his best friend, bandmate, and business partner, Atticus Ross, and they get to work. Reznor and Ross observe the same hours, Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 7... See more

The sick “up all night” feeling never gets talked about in my line of work, because it doesn’t hold any anecdotes. You’re there alone, knowing that the progress of the session is hinging on your ability to raise the work to the next level of stability. Like being a dressmaker with the most beautiful design, realizing that he is just a bit short of

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All this is to say is that for design, as for other fields, the road to greatness is often paved with obsession—an immoderate, unjustifiable surplus of care. Doing things that no-one asked for with a love that no-one could reasonably expect.