Trent Reznor Remembers "Fatherly Figure" David Bowie: "I Didn’t Think We Were Done"

David Bowie photo by Jimmy King

Trent Reznor has shared a long remembrance of David Bowie over at Rolling Stone. “I didn’t think we were done,” he said. “It feels like the loss of a mentor, fatherly figure, someone looking out for you, reminding you that in a world where the bar keeps seeming to be lower, where stupidity has got a foothold, there is room for excellence and uncompromising vision.”

Reznor and Bowie worked and toured together in the mid-90s, during Bowie’s Outside and Earthling eras. Reznor recalled to Rolling Stone about Bowie admitting that NIN were “going to blow us away every night,” but that he wasn’t going to play what everyone wanted to hear. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow. I’m witnessing firsthand the fearlessness that I’ve read about,’” Reznor writes. 

He also says Bowie encouraged him to get sober:

When I met David, he had been through that. And he was content. He was at peace with himself, with an incredible wife, clearly in love. There were a number of times where the two of us were alone, and he said some things that weren’t scolding, but pieces of wisdom that stuck with me: “You know, there is a better way here, and it doesn’t have to end in despair or in death, in the bottom.”

Read our “Afterword” feature on Bowie, plus tributes from Nile Rodgers, Bradford Cox, Carlos Dengler, Thurston Moore, Carlos Alomar, and Jonathan Lethem.

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