Tracklist and Introduction
01. Somewhat Damaged
02. The Day the World Went Away
03. The Frail
04. The Wretched
05. Missing Places
06. We're in This Together
07. The Fragile
08. Just Like You Imagined
09. The Great Collapse
10. The March
11. Even Deeper
12. Pilgrimage
13. One Way to Get There
14. No, You Don't
15. Taken
16. La Mer
17. Adrift and at Peace
18. The Great Below
19. Not What It Seems Like
20. White Mask
21. The New Flesh
22. The Way out Is Through
23. Into the Void
24. Where Is Everybody?
25. The Mark Has Been Made
26. 10 Miles High
27. Was It Worth It?
28. Things Falling Apart
29. Please (+ Appendage)
30. Can I Stay Here?
31. Feeders
32. Starfuckers, Inc.
33. Complication
34. Claustrophobia Machine (Raw)
35. Last Heard From
36. I'm Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally
37. And All That Could Have Been
38. The Big Come Down
39. Underneath It All
40. Ripe [with Decay]
Runtime: 2h44m13s
Expanding on the original release of Nine Inch Nails' 1999 masterpiece The Fragile, this collection has been titled The Fragile (And All That Could Have Been), henceforth referred to by the acronym TFAATCHB.
History
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| The Fragile - CD and Vinyl cover. |
Disc 1 (Left)
01. Somewhat Damaged
02. The Day the World Went Away
03. The Frail
04. The Wretched
05. We're in This Together
06. The Fragile
07. Just Like You Imagined
08. Even Deeper
09. Pilgrimage
10. No, You Don't
11. La Mer
12. The Great Below
Disc 2 (Right)
01. The Way out Is Through
02. Into the Void
03. Where Is Everybody?
04. The Mark Has Been Made
05. Please
06. Starfuckers, Inc.
07. Complication
08. I'm Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally
09. The Big Come Down
10. Underneath It All
11. Ripe (with Decay)
Between these three formats, the complete experience of officially released material for The Fragile wasn't the 23-song version on the CD but the 25.5 songs attainable by adding the bonus material from the cassette and vinyl releases into a new playlist at their appropriate times in accordance with their releases.
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| Things Falling Apart |
Two years later, before NIN mastermind Trent Reznor put his career on hiatus to go to rehab for cocaine and alcohol, Nine Inch Nails released a live album called And All That Could Have Been with a limited edition companion EP called Still. Boasting nine songs, Still featured four quieted versions of classic NIN favorites and five new compositions. Among the five new songs were "Adrift and at Peace" and the title track "And All That Could Have Been." Reznor has since confirmed that "Adrift and at Peace" was at one time considered an outro or ending piece for "La Mer" from the original release of The Fragile. Likewise, a brief breakdown between the first two verses of "And All That Could Have Been" features the same chord progression as the crescendo of The Fragile's Disc 1 closing song "The Great Below," confirming its at-one-time intended use on the album. Nine Inch Nails frequently use leitmotifs and recurring lyrical and musical themes throughout multiple songs across an album (see the chorus of "Heresy," piano outro of "Closer" and acoustic guitar of "The Downward Spiral" on 1994's The Downward Spiral), and 'The Fragile' is no different ("La Mer" shares chord progressions
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| Still. |
The three remaining new tracks from 2002's Still have unconfirmed origins, though Trent Reznor has stated that "some" of the new songs were composed for his unused score of Mark Romanek's film One Hour Photo. Since I can't verify any of those songs' intentions for The Fragile, those three were left alone while the other two ("Adrift and at Peace" and "And All That Could Have Been") add to the increasing list of songs we can confirm as having some kind of home in the original The Fragile recording sessions.
To recap, by this time, bonus material on top of the main CD release of The Fragile includes the vinyl bonus tracks "10 Miles High" and "The New Flesh," the cassette remix epilogue "Appendage," the untitled song from ThingsFallingApart.com, "The Great Collapse" from the remix album Things Falling Apart and the two clearly-related songs from Still - "Adrift and at Peace" and "And All That Could Have Been."
Fast forward 13 years. In 2015, following five subsequent Nine Inch Nails LP's, Trent Reznor began working with Dr. Dre and Apple to launch Apple Music. To promote the launch of the program, Reznor released instrumental versions of Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile and With Teeth. The Fragile (Instrumental), a collection of wordless versions of the original 23 commercially-released Fragile songs, even boasted alternate versions of some of its already-instrumental songs and three MORE bonus songs from the recording sessions. These songs were titled "The March," "Can I Stay Here?" and "Hello, Everything Is Not OK." "Hello, Everything Is Not OK" shares a chorus with "10 Miles High" and is believed to be an alternate, early or demo version of the latter. "Can I Stay Here?" is previously unheard and "The March" was taken from the vaults and reworked into the Reznor-produced "Skin of a Drum" by Saul Williams in 2007 - it's been confirmed in interviews that some of the old The Fragile leftovers were used for Williams's album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust, which not only features "Skin of a Drum" but is entirely produced by Reznor.
Finally, around this time, Reznor teased "new NIN in 2016" though nothing was heard from the band again until December 2016 when they announced a new EP and "definitive versions" of most of their previous records, remastered on vinyl. Included in this new catalogue was not only The Fragile but a new, expanded take on the record, called The Fragile (Deviations 1). This four-LP set contains all the Apple Music instrumentals (and its bonus tracks) as well as nine ADDITIONAL songs and bits from the 1997-1999 Fragile recording sessions.
It was at this point in time it occurred to me that the world finally had as exhaustive and complete of an allocation of material from Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile sessions as it was going to get. The only problem was that it was spread across a half dozen releases, some of which had gone out of production up to 16 years before (more on that later), and the most comprehensive version (Deviations 1) didn't have any of the lyrics.
The Curation Process
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| The Fragile (Deviations 1) |
My framework was to start with the Deviations 1 and Apple Music instrumentals sequencing, restore as much of them with the original 1999 CD release as possible, fill in the bonus tracks where I had clues (e.g. the vinyl bonus songs, patterns of leitmotifs and interviews with Trent about song placement) and then add the rest wherever it felt right. As a lifelong fan of Nine Inch Nails, I felt a real obligation to the project.
The actual tracklist for Deviations 1 (if we don't yet differentiate between instrumental vs. vocal versions) is nearly identical to the tracklist for 'TFAATCHB' with the following exceptions.
1) "The Great Collapse," "Adrift and at Peace," "And All That Could Have Been" and "Things Falling Apart" (which is what I've named the untitled segue from ThingsFallingApart.com) do not appear on Deviations 1. At least the first three are completed and officially-released songs from The Fragile recording sessions so I felt they belong. The unofficially titled "Things Falling Apart" is the only remaining audio heard from these sessions with no other releases.
2) On Deviations 1, "Feeders" is preceded by "10 Miles High (Instrumental)" which is actually "Hello, Everything Is Not OK" from the Apple Music instrumentals. I replaced "Hello..." with the original "10 Miles High" and moved it to its spot on the vinyl release (after "The Mark Has Been Made"). I felt that having both would be redundant, and "10 Miles High" sounds more polished, final and in-line with the official 1999 releases than "Hello..." does.
3) On Deviations 1, "Please" and "Appendage" are split into two separate tracks. I rejoined them to honor the spirit of the 1999 cassette release, which lists them as "Please (+ Appendage)" rather than
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| The Fragile - cassette. |
My reasons for placing the four songs not included in Deviations 1 where I did are as follows. The first two listed below felt like they'd appear on the first disc of the 1999 CD release; the last two just felt like disc 2 material. Now for each song individually. "The Great Collapse" shares its only lyrics with "The Wretched," as I've said. Also, much like "The Frail" is like a reprise of "The Fragile," I can't deny the simpler nature of "The Great Collapse" in comparison with its lyrical counterpart. I feel that they're linked. Also, on the original 1999 releases of The Fragile, I happened to notice that most of the related songs ("The Frail" and "The Fragile," "La Mer" and "Into the Void," etc) were three or four tracks apart, so I stuck "The Great Collapse" four songs after "The Wretched"'s place on the 1999 release. I think the other two pairings and this one are clever ways to take a breather and recall or anticipate a musical or lyrical theme. "Adrift and at Peace" was a no-brainer, since, as I mentioned earlier, Trent has stated that it's essentially a closing piece for "La Mer." The difficult part was separating "La Mer" from "The Great Below," which I did by cutting off the post-vocal section of the 1999 release of the song and replacing it with the Deviations 1 version, which ends without mingling with "The Great Below." I then cut off the slow fade-in/intro at the beginning of "Adrift and at Peace" as well as "La Mer"'s overlap with "The Great Below" and fused them together for a surprising but nonstop flow between the two tracks similar to how "Missing Places" on Deviations 1 ends and "We're in This Together" begins after an excised intro.
"Things Falling Apart" was a little 65-second segue and it just felt right to put it before "Please," since Trent had already separated the vinyl edition's "10 Miles High -> Please" with the new "Was It Worth It?" on Deviations 1. The song "And All That Could Have Been," on the other hand, has always, always struck me as a continuation of "I'm Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally," despite sharing some chords with "The Great Below." In both "And All That Could Have Been" and "I'm Looking Forward to Joining You, Finally," the protagonist of the story dwells broken-hearted on loss, specifically involving some kind of relationship, using winter imagery (frost, snow, freezing, ice) to express his lamentations. Something in my gut told me to put them together as a slow reaction to the album's preceding events before the final descent of the last three songs on the album. I was able to sew them together by giving "Complication" its independence with a Deviations 1 ending, then after the new songs, using the longer intro to "I'm Looking Forward..." from Deviations 1 and sneaking it onto the beginning of the 1999 CD release. At the end of "I'm Looking Forward," I took the 20-second rain-and-synth intro for "And All That Could Have Been" as it appeared on Still and I did a very short fade-in to help it stand alone. I then took it and overlapped its first 10 seconds with the last 10 seconds of "I'm Looking Forward" so the two flow seamlessly.
In any other place in which a song from the original release was tied to its successor but I needed to separate them to fit bonus tracks in, I used similar tricks taking the intros/outros from 2016's Deviations 1 and replacing the problematic segues. Sometimes I broke songs apart (e.g. "The Wretched" and "We're in This Together") and other times I rejoined them ("The Mark Has Been Made" and "10 Miles High"), in accordance with getting every song flowing smoothly with as few breaks as possible.
The final runtime for TFAATCHB is 164m13s, or 2 hours, 44 minutes and 13 seconds. This is longer than the original CD release by just over a full hour. It boasts 40 songs compared to the CD's 23 and culls material from seven separate audio sources. From the time I envisioned this project in high school (when the multiple versions of The Fragile were released on 9/21/99) to its final completion, it spanned 17 years, three months and eight days.
Sources
All 23 songs from the original 1999 CD release of The Fragile represent their place in this mix, except for "We're in This Together" and the intro/outro exceptions noted above.
All bonus materials which appeared first on the Apple Music instrumentals and subsequently on Deviations 1 are taken directly from a high-quality digital download of The Fragile (Deviations 1) from store.nin.com. This includes "Missing Places," "The March," "One Way to Get There," "Taken," "Not What It Seems Like," "White Mask," "Was It Worth It?," "Can I Stay Here?," "Feeders," "Claustrophobia Machine (Raw)" and "Last Heard From."
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| We're in This Together (Pt. 1) CD single. |
"The Great Collapse" is from a CD copy of the 2000 remix album Things Falling Apart.
"Adrift and at Peace" and "And All That Could Have Been" are taken from a CD copy of Still as it appeared in the deluxe edition of the 2002 live CD release And All That Could Have Been.
"Things Falling Apart" is taken from an mp3 of a web rip from ThingsFallingApart.com.
"Appendage" is taken from a high-quality mp3 import of the original cassette release of The Fragile.
Quality
Every assurance was made to achieve the highest possible sound quality. Regarding the above-listed sources, the original release of The Fragile as well as the CD's We're in This Together (Pt. 1), Still and Things Falling Apart were ripped on a MacBook in iTunes (from their commercially-bought physical editions) as 44.1khz WAV files. The Deviations 1 bonus songs are all downloaded WAV files of equal or higher quality directly from the digital purchase of The Fragile (Deviations 1) on store.nin.com. Only "Things Falling Apart" and "Appendage" arrive as-is from their original mp3 sources.
Any required editing was done in WavePad Sound Editor. Every finalized WAV file has also been copied and converted to a 320kbps CBR mp3 in Switch Sound File Converter for ease of use, although the original WAV files remain uncompressed for purposes of continuous/gapless playback.
Disc Breaks
Disc 1: Tracks 01-12
Disc 2: Tracks 13-27
Disc 3: Tracks 28-40
Availability, Ethics and Random Thoughts
For obvious legal reasons, I can neither give nor sell The Fragile (And All That Could Have Been) to you no matter how nicely you ask or how much you offer me. It's also a matter of supporting the artist; these songs are all worth owning. I legally own purchased copies of every song on here aside from the website rip of the untitled song I'm calling "Things Falling Apart." Even "Appendage," which I'll admit I downloaded for this - I own my cassette copy of The Fragile but never figured out how to hook up my cassette player to a computer and record a good-quality version of the track. So instead of sharing this with you, I'd encourage you to purchase a CD copy of the original 1999 release and track down as many of the other songs as you legally can and curate your own personal version of this sprawling epic for home use. Curating extended album mixes is actually a lot of fun. Sure there are reasons some of these songs weren't included on the original commercial releases, but nobody's telling you to burn your old copies and only listen to a personalized mix instead. I've also fleshed out versions of Radiohead's The King of Limbs and Kid A/mnesiac and I'm proud of those too. We're fortunate to live in an age where we can customize our own music and make albums into personal experiences again.
That brings me to my next point. I'm sure that plenty of people (read: imaginary) will ask "Why didn't you include (insert other Nine Inch Nails song from 1997-2000 here) on this? You suck!" Well, several years ago I saw someone had really gone "kitchen sink" on The Fragile and made a mix that included something like every new piece from Still, a couple remixes from Things Falling Apart, "Deep" (from the Tomb Raider soundtrack), and all of Trent and Co.'s contributions to the Lost Highway soundtrack. It may be longer, and it may work for them, but to me it was more of an endurance test of that entire half-decade, losing the focus of the original record in favor of just "having more." More power to the person who made it, but that's not for me. I forced myself to only include songs that I knew were written and recorded for the purpose of inclusion on The Fragile (whether they made the 1999 cut or not), which was difficult because the remaining Still pieces are gorgeous.
Anyway, I digress. Thanks for reading; this was incredibly fun and I'll soon be thinking about what to do next.
