“Something I Can Never Have” by Nine Inch Nails

"Something I Can Never Have" sits fifth on Pretty Hate Machine, the 1989 debut from Nine Inch Nails, and it's the record's bleakest corner, a song that has been read as dealing with suicide. Trent Reznor wrote and sang it and co-produced it in London with John Fryer, though he admitted he mostly stepped back from the sessions.

Fryer's hand is all over the sound: a piano filtered into a haze and drowned in reverb, giving the track the dreamy quality Reznor credited him with. Backing tracks left over from This Mortal Coil, the collective Fryer belonged to, slipped into the mix by accident, and both men liked the result enough to keep them. A version with a different ending later turned up in Natural Born Killers in 1994.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.