Wiki
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Length
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"We're In This Together" is the fifth track on the Left disc of The Fragile. It was also released as a single, receiving the designation of Halo 15.
According to Keith Hillebrandt, the "whole song started from something (Reznor) actually played at the end of another track. He wrote it up into an entirely new song." The lyrics may be inspired by "Heroes" by David Bowie. The drums are pitched unusually high, and the reason for this is that producer Alan Moulder initially thought that the song would go nowhere, as it was only a seed of an idea at the time, so he tuned the drums this way somewhat as a joke.
Trent Reznor commented on the creation of the song in a VIVA 2 Magazine interview:
"When I wrote that song it was one of the last songs for the record. I like the obviousness of the track but I was fearful of the obviousness of the track and in a record that I think is pretty dense and somewhat challenging to get through, I didn't want a song that was too obviously the hit single. Of all the tracks on that album I think that was the hardest to arrange and mix, because if it was mixed poorly, it sounded too obvious in the context of the record, and at this point we were very aware of the context of the record. So what I learned from the process of doing that was the vocal track I would have thrown out that was out of tune and my voice was breaking up was the one that I needed to use, because it added a desperation that made the whole mood of the song feel right."
Beginning out of the ending of "The Wretched" with a machine-like, rhythmic sound collage, it builds in volume and intensity but stops to introduce the main rhythmic thrust of the song, a distorted and staccato guitar riff that runs through all of the verses. After the drums and wah guitar enter, Reznor begins yelling the first verse abrasively. The chorus is driven by loud, distorted and constant guitars and live drums accompanying more melodic and higher-pitched yelling by Reznor. After a second verse and chorus, a driving bridge featuring a wah guitar solo and walls of fluent guitars leads into a final chorus. A descending guitar riff from this chorus continues through the mellow coda of the song, a section which also shares the three-note motif used in "The Great Below" and the piano motif of "La Mer." It eventually gives way to the opening e-bow guitar line of "The Fragile." On the vinyl version, the segue from "The Wretched" (in the beginning) is removed; on the singles, the song is completely cropped from segues at the beginning and ending. An alternate version of the introduction was indexed separately and titled "Missing Places" on The Fragile: Deviations 1.
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