Spin have posted a piece about former The Icarus Line/Nine Inch Nails guitarist (and ex-Buddyhead scribe) Aaron North‘s struggle with mental illness; which among other things saw him isolate himself for weeks at a time and walk away from the music industry.
The piece also includes commentary from former friends and bandmates of North, including Nine Inch Nails‘ Trent Reznor, Queens Of The Stone Age bassist Michael Shuman and The Dillinger Escape Plan‘s Ben Weinman. You can read it in full at Spin.com with an excerpt available below:
“I should be dead. I used to walk alone in Watts or South Central trying to pick fights with gang members to try and get killed. I’d think about walking into traffic all the time. Then I finally decided I’d kill myself by jumping off the bridge. I didn’t think anyone would be sad for me, because if they were sad, they should’ve been sad for me years before I actually did it.
I was gonna jump from either the Golden Gate Bridge or the Vincent Thomas in San Pedro. The day I decided to do it, I was driving, and I got to the ramp and thought, ‘If I go north, I’ll jump off the Golden Gate, and if I go south, I’ll do it in San Pedro.’ Then I realized that the ramp is the same one I used to get on to go visit my mom in Cucamonga, and I didn’t do it. I still wanted to die, I just didn’t want my mom to deal with it.”
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