Nine Inch Nails released The Fragile in the United States on September 21, 1999. Their third studio album stretched across two CDs, with Trent Reznor and co-producer Alan Moulder assembling the music at Nothing Studios in New Orleans. Among its singles was “We’re in This Together,” a song whose relatively straightforward structure became an unexpected challenge during an album built through constant experimentation.
The project followed The Downward Spiral after a five-year gap. Reznor had worked on other artists’ records in between, including Marilyn Manson’s Antichrist Superstar, while struggling with his own response to success. In a Los Angeles Times interview later quoted by Loudwire, he described the new album as someone attempting to restore order after everything had fallen apart. Where its predecessor had stripped its subject down, The Fragile would start from that wreckage and attempt an unsuccessful reconstruction. That idea extended to how the music was made.
Moulder told Sound on Sound in May 2000 that they cataloged fragments by key, tempo and time signature, allowing parts to move between songs. “La Mer” began with piano, then acquired drums borrowed from another piece and a separate guitar loop. Reworking its bass instrumentation and drums while retaining the chords and tempo produced “Into the Void.” “We’re in This Together” posed the opposite problem. It emerged from a guitar-loop experiment, but Reznor and Moulder worried that the resulting song sounded too conventional. Their attempts to make it stranger nearly damaged what worked. “It is what it is and it’s good, so don’t try to ruin that,” Moulder said. They eventually accepted the song’s character instead of forcing it to resemble the other experiments around it.
The finished album also allowed extended passages without a lead vocal. “Just Like You Imagined” featured pianist Mike Garson and guitarist Adrian Belew, giving the instrumental its own cast of players. It followed the title track on the first disc, placing a piece carried by its instrumental arrangement immediately after one built around Reznor’s voice.
Finding an order for that range of material became a separate task. Producer Bob Ezrin joined Reznor in New Orleans for a week to help sequence the record. Ezrin concentrated on establishing the beginnings and endings of both halves before working through the journey between them. Several attempts failed before the sequence settled into place. The CD edition ultimately held 23 tracks, opening with “Somewhat Damaged” and dividing between “The Great Below” and “The Way Out Is Through.”
That finished sequence left material from the sessions unused.
Reznor returned to those recordings with Atticus Ross for The Fragile: Deviations 1, issued in 2017. The 37-track project combined instrumental versions, alternate treatments and previously unreleased material from the original sessions. In Nine Inch Nails’ announcement, Reznor explained that removing the vocals had changed his experience of the record and that revisiting it had become therapeutic. The new version incorporated music that had been left outside the original album, allowing listeners to hear more of the recordings from which The Fragile had been assembled.
