Nine Inch Nails‘ “Something I Can Never Have” is a slow piano ballad from “Pretty Hate Machine”, and Kerrang! once called it “the most spine-tinglingly personal cut” on the band’s 1989 debut. Trent Reznor gets there with very little material. The piano keeps coming back to one repeated figure, and the vocal regularly steps away to let it carry on alone. The official piano/vocal/guitar arrangement on MuseScore puts all of that on the page, which makes it a good score to study if you want to see space used as a compositional tool.
Where “Something I Can Never Have” came from
While Reznor was working out the songs that became the record, he had a job as an assistant engineer and janitor at Right Track Studios in Cleveland, and studio owner Bart Koster let him record his own songs whenever the rooms weren’t booked. “Pretty Hate Machine” came out on TVT in October 1989. “Really, ‘Pretty Hate Machine’ was born from tinkering around in the studio at night,” Reznor told Rolling Stone in 2019. In the same interview, he said, “I remember ‘Sanctified’ and ‘Something I Can Never Have’ were pretty early.”
Kerrang!’s Sam Law calls it “a simple piano ballad” and points to its “looping instrumentation and sparse deployment of wheezing synths/pulsating beats.” He also writes that it “paved the way for future classics like Hurt and Right Where It Belongs.” Reznor brought it back in 1994, when he curated the soundtrack for Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers and included an “Edited And Extended” version of it.
Waiting for the vocal
Bar numbers here follow the MuseScore arrangement, which reduces the record to a piano part and a vocal line. It also uses a D.S. al Coda, so the second verse repeats from bar 11 before the score jumps to the Coda at bar 35.
The arrangement is marked “Electronic slow tempo,” with no metronome number, and it starts at mp. For the first two beats, the only sound is a low B5 chord in the left hand, and that chord stays tied through the first two bars. The right hand comes in partway through bar 1 with the figure that keeps coming back throughout the song. Apart from a middle C on each downbeat, it’s one note, the G a fifth above it, played over and over, with one A-flat slipped in near the end of every pass. That G clashes with the F-sharp in the B5, and the B5 doesn’t appear again after bar 2. In bar 3, the bass moves up a half step to C5, where the main loop starts.
The vocal doesn’t enter until the last sixteenth note of bar 10, so the piano has nearly ten bars to itself. Once the singing starts, it keeps backing off. In bars 12 and 16, the vocal holds a note into the downbeat and then sits out most of the bar, and each time the right hand drops straight back into that repeated G.
The left hand follows the same plan. Through the verses, it moves only once or twice a bar, in whole notes and half notes. When the chorus arrives in bar 23, it switches to quarter-note chords on every beat, and after the title line lands in bar 31, it goes right back to holding one chord across two bars.
Once the vocal is in, its longest break comes after the second chorus. After the vocal wraps up a line in the first half of bar 44, the piano carries on alone until bar 52. That’s seven full bars where the arrangement trusts the piano to hold your attention without a word sung over it.
Leaving the third to the melody
Most of the chord symbols in the arrangement are “5” chords, mainly C5 and F5. In guitar shorthand, that’s a root and a fifth with no third, and the third is the note that makes a chord sound major or minor. As Guitar World’s Chris Bird puts it, “by leaving out the most colorful notes, power chords have a more solid, neutral sound.”
The pattern hardly changes, either. For most of the song, the chords alternate between a bar of C5 and a bar split between C/E and F5. C/E, a C major chord with E in the bass, is the only chord in that loop with a third in it.
With the chords holding back the third, the melody decides which one you hear. In the verses, every E that the vocal hits is E natural, the major third of C. Starting with the chorus in bar 23, the vocal line flattens that note to E-flat, the minor third, and the flat is written into almost every chorus bar after that. The end of the title line in bar 31 sits on E-flat before dropping to C over the C5 chord.
In the C/E bars of the first chorus, the two-thirds clash outright, with the voice on E-flat and the left hand on E natural. The score even prints a courtesy natural on that low E in bars 24 and 30, so the pianist doesn’t flatten it by mistake. The right-hand figure gives F5 a minor third too. Whenever it plays through a bar split between C/E and F5, its A-flat lands on the last beat, right over the F5 chord.
The chord symbols disappear altogether at bar 52, where the score reads N.C., for “no chord.” For four bars, the left hand gives up its long notes and takes over the repeated-G figure, down in the bass clef, while the right hand mostly doubles the vocal. The held notes come back with C5 in bar 56.
How “Something I Can Never Have” Ends
The ending reaches for chords that don’t appear anywhere else in the arrangement. In both earlier choruses, the title line came down on C5 in bars 31 and 44. The last two times it comes around, it lands on B-flat5 in bar 68 and then on A-flat5 in bar 70. That A-flat has been slipping into the right-hand figure since bar 1, and here it finally gets a chord of its own.
Bar 71 gives the piano one more pass at the repeated G, with the voice silent and the left hand still holding the A-flat5 chord from the bar before. In the final bar, the vocal line and the right hand both have whole rests under fermatas. All that’s left is an F5 chord in the left hand, held for as long as the player chooses to let it ring.
