[mp3]

Nine Inch Nails - "Maybe Just Once" (mp3)

A song from Trent Reznor's 1988 demo CD. I'll probably write more about the whole demo soon, but I genuinely like this song, except for the huge amount of time it takes to get moving. What I can't get my head around is how much the chorus sounds like top 40 dance pop of the time-- I mean, even the lyrics. Not the vocals, of course, but that only makes it more interesting; I can't help imagining an A&R guy listening to this demo and wondering what was going on. Did some unstable kid steal Taylor Dayne's synthesizer?

I didn't trust my own memory, so I had to go look up the dates on the first albums by Debbie Gibson, Taylor Dayne, and a few others... and yeah, this was right in the thick of it. It certainly sounds more like them to me than like Depeche Mode or whatever. If only he'd stuck with it, this guy could have been huge!