The Song Nine Inch Nails Didn’t Play Live Until 20 Years After Its Release

The Nine Inch Nails song “The Perfect Drug” came out in 1997 as part of the soundtrack for David Lynch’s iconic film Lost Highway. It might be surprising for some fans to hear that the band didn’t perform that song at all when it was first released. In fact, Nine Inch Nails didn’t play it live at all for 20 entire years.

“The Perfect Drug” was hugely popular with fans of the industrial rock band. Today, it’s still considered a fan-favorite deep cut. So why didn’t the band perform the song at all for so many years? According to frontman Trent Reznor, it came down to personal taste and disappointment with his own work.

Why Didn’t Nine Inch Nails Play “The Perfect Drug” Live For So Long?

According to Reznor himself, Nine Inch Nails rarely ever performed “The Perfect Drug” live because he was particularly disappointed with how the song came out.

“I’m not cringing about it, but it’s not my favorite piece,” Reznor said in an interview back in 2005. “If they said play me, y’know, the top hundred songs you’ve written, that probably wouldn’t be in the top hundred.”

That’s quite the claim, considering how huge Nine Inch Nails’s discography is. Reznor went on to say that he was given a week to do the track for Lost Highway.

“It was one of those things where you have a week to do a track for a movie, the mindset that you kind of adapt in that situation, or I did, was ‘let’s go in and experiment and see what happens, and it’s not, y’know, whatever comes out of it, it’s not the end of the world,’” Reznor continued.

Despite Reznor disliking the song, Nine Inch Nails did eventually perform it live. Back in 2017, the band surprised fans by whipping out a rendition of “The Perfect Drug” at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado during their tour with Jesus And Mary Chain. It was the very first time they ever performed the song live. And it came about 20 years after the track was released.

When it comes down to it, sometimes you just don’t vibe with one of the hundreds of songs you’ve created through the years as a famous industrial rock musician. Still, we’re glad Nine Inch Nails played “The Perfect Drug” at least once for a few hundred lucky fans.

Photo by R. Diamond/Getty Images for VetsAid 2022

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