Growing up in tiny Mercer, Penn. (population 2,391), Michael Trent Reznor took piano lessons and played Professor Harold Hill in a high school production of "The Music Man." But in 1980 at the age of 15, Reznor heard Gary Numan's "Cars" on the radio and heard his future – beyond Mercer town limits.  "When that kind of explosion of synth music came around in the early '80s, it was really exciting," he said later. "Sequencers were just coming out. I thought, I love music, I love keyboard instruments. Maybe I can get into synthesizer design."

The young musician surrounded himself with the new machines. He eventually moved to Cleveland, joined a string of new wave cover bands (which would come back to haunt him via YouTube), and took a job at a music store and then a recording studio.