A long road back to being Trent Reznor

TORONTO — Showtime was still a few hours away, and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails was sitting in a hushed, candlelit room backstage at the Air Canada Centre trying to find his scream. Nails' music sounds like a massive nightmare machine, but, on this day, Reznor woke up with his voice small and croaky. As a humidifier gently chugged away in the corner, the rock star smiled faintly and asked, "How old am I again?"

The answer is 43, but Reznor, who clawed through some dark years of drug addiction, is a picture of vitality these days with his brawny shoulders and clear-eyed confidence. He is also serious and candid. Asked about the time when the backstage scene at a Nails show would have been less seance and more human sacrifice, Reznor squinted down at his palms like a farsighted fortune- teller.

"I got so bad that I couldn't even write down songs that were caught in my head," he said. "And then I would feel depressed, so I would go and get more messed up. I finally pulled out of it. Then it was great to discover that I hadn't killed myself and my liver still worked and eventually my brain started functioning again, and then [I] was enjoying the process again."

That process is, in simple terms, caging up the songs that swim through his stormy and considerable imagination. Reznor, whose band will play a sold-out show at the Forum on Saturday, is one of the acclaimed creative figures of his generation in rock, a showman who occupies a territory somewhere between the digital throb of the dance club and the thunderous amps of arena rock. There's always been a melding, too, of the tribal and the technological in his work, and that has been the most fascinating subplot of Reznor's career here in 2008.

The first week in May, Reznor typed the words, "This one's on me," and posted the message on his website, NIN.com, along with an entire new album's worth of raw, twitchy music titled "The Slip." There was no advance notice given, no advertising or anything that remotely resembled a conventional record-label approach. More than 1 million fans downloaded "The Slip" by the end of the month.

It was the second Nine Inch Nails release in two months. Reznor posted the 36-track "Ghosts I-IV," an unsettling instrumental collection, in similar fashion earlier in the year.

Nine Inch Nails -- which is the name Reznor records under; it's more of a brand-name for him than a traditional band -- finished off a contractual commitment to Interscope Records last year, and Reznor walked away and found the fear of a truly liberated man.