Billy Howerdel is best known as the songwriter and guitarist for A Perfect Circle, the band he created with his good friend James Maynard Keenan (Tool / Puscifer) after they met when Tool were supporting Fishbone for whom Howerdel was a guitar tech in the early nineties, before sharing a house together in the Hollywood Hills. Howerdel would work on his early material while also engineering for the likes of David Bowie, Guns n’ Roses, and Nine Inch Nails.
Even geniuses get beat up by the press and fans sometimes. There were very few albums as big, pervasive in music culture and brilliant as Nine Inch Nails career highlight The Downward Spiral (Nothing/Interscope) was in 1994. The problem is, how do you follow it up, especially when the entire world jumped on the bandwagon and copied your style? Well, you don’t do a belly flop into stasis, you work harder than ever to expand, change drastically and do all the things. The Fragile (Nothing/Interscope) is Trent Reznor doing all the things, really well. Continue reading