Trent Reznor has admitted that he doesn’t think the environment
is right to release new Nine Inch Nails music, and he doesn’t particularly want
to tour, either.
In a huge new two-hour interview on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton
podcast, father-of-five Trent admits that the pandemic was a “revelation” for
him in terms of realising that his priorities are very much staying at home and
being a family man. “I don’t really want to do anything right now,”
he says. “I want to feel okay and I want to make sure my family’s okay. And
that’s okay.”
Trent adds that, “I don’t want to be away from my kids, not that
much. I don’t want to miss their lives out to go and do a thing I am grateful
to be able to do and I’m appreciative that you’re here to see it, but I’ve done
it a lot.”
His reasons for not especially wanting to release new NIN music
are very different, though, with the culture and “lack of importance of music in
today’s world” from his perspective leaving him feeling “a little defeated”.
“It feels to me in general – and I’m saying this as a 57-year-old
man – music used to be the thing; that was what I was doing,” Trent
explains. “When I had time I was listening to music. I wasn’t doing it in the
background while I was doing five other things, and I wasn’t treating it kind
of like a disposable commodity. I don’t go to the cinema and do my taxes while
movies are playing. I’m there to watch a movie.
“I kind of miss the attention music got; the critical attention
music got, not that I’m that interested in a critic’s opinion, but to send
something out into the world and feel like it touched places. It might have got
a negative or positive [response] but somebody heard it. It got validated in
its own way, culturally. That feels askew [now]…
“That makes for a less fertile
environment to put music out into, in the world of Nine Inch Nails.”
Nevertheless, Trent is working, and he teases that he’s
doing stuff that isn’t music, and it’s more “around storytelling”. So watch
this space…