Trent Reznor On Keeping His Private Life Private

Imhotep has an interview with Trent Reznor. In the piece, we get to hear Trent talk about the second part of Year Zero, the difference in his writing process for With Teeth versus the process used to compose the more recent albums, and, most interestingly to me, why he has made a conscious decision to keep his private life private:

I don’t really want my fans to see me. What I’ve tried to do in the media is not to let my personality get in the way of the music. In a way, that creates its own aura. Today with the Internet and MTV it is easy to reach out and overexpose yourself to people, and I don’t mean like I was embarrassed about myself, but when you listen to a Nine Inch Nails record, I don’t want you to know what I look like, I want you to create your own version about the record.

As I’ve written in my Oeuvre Blog entries, I’ve always been a listener more concerned with answering the question “How does this lyric apply to my own life, to my own experience?” than most. And I suppose my obsession with Nine Inch Nails has a lot to do with the fact that I don’t think about Trent Reznor when I’m listening to the music. I think about me, and about the lyrics, and about whether or not I’m going to break something as I dance around my house like a maniac.

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Worth Your Consideration 006 - A GF5 Linkdump

• Nine Inch Nails and Pitchfork.tv have followed up on Monday’s posting of the rehearsal of “1,000,000” with two more clips of tour rehearsal footage, one for “Letting You” and a second for “Echoplex”. These clips further solidify the fact that I am an idiot for not having a ticket to see NIN on this tour yet. Good grief, this new line-up is good!
• In other NIN news, check out the picture above for a sneak peek at how the band is using Google Earth to enhance the tour experience this time around, and check out the notes on the photo on Flickr for a more details. It almost makes me want to download Google Earth. Almost. (Why can’t that program run in a browser yet?)
• And, lastly, in non-NIN news, and on a much more somber note, please do read Kevin Smith’s thoughts on George Carlin’s passing, which show just how much the filmmaker admired the late comic and his work.

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NIN 2008 Rehearsal Footage (Video)

Pitchfork.tv has “the first of three exclusive videos filmed during rehearsals for [Nine Inch Nails’] upcoming tour” and it’s a doozy. The band performs the song “1,000,000” (embedded above) and they really tear through the thing. A while back, I worried about Robin Finck rejoining the band but the dude has totally shut me up.

Of course, this just makes me that much sadder that I don’t have a ticket to either one of the band’s shows in the area (August 7 at Mohegan Sun in Uncasville, CT; and August 8 at DCU Center in Worcester, MA). But, hey, I’ve still got time to sell a kidney, right?

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Worth Your Consideration 003 - A GF5 Linkdump

• The latest Nine Inch Nails album, The Slip, which is available as a free download will also now be available as a physical CD. However, The NIN Hotline reports that only 200,000 copies will be released in the United States. The physical release will include, among other things, “a DVD of NIN performing live tracks from The Slip at rehearsals,” and I am ready to beat down anybody who stands in the way of me getting a copy.
• William Katt, the star of the most awesome television program of all-time, The Greatest American Hero, will be guest-starring on NBC’s Heroes next season. Newsarama reports that Katt will play a “really, really wonderful, seedy, smarmy-mouthed reporter.” Me, I haven’t seen any of the second season of Heroes, but I’m definitely going to have to catch up, now that I know about this upcoming guest appearance.

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NIN Oeuvre Blog: Only

Editor’s Note: This entry originally appeared on the blog Ten Thousand Lies on June 26, 2007.

It was at some point during the summer of 2005 that I asked my brother, the man responsible for introducing me to Nine Inch Nails in the first place, what he thought of the band’s new single, “Only.”

“It sounds like gay disco,” he told me.*

And you know what? He was right. I’ve come to think of it as something more like a gay square dance myself—try singing “Now bow to your partner! Now, do-si-do!” over the intro, and you’ll see what I mean—but the simple fact is that I agree with my brother. There’s something queer about “Only”. Where my brother and I part ways on this matter is in the fact that I see gay disco/square dance as a viable musical genre, and he does not.

“Only” is certainly the closest to a straight new-wave/dance song that Trent’s gotten since Pretty Hate Machine, and I, for one, welcomed the return when I first heard it. From the callback to “Down In It”—so that’s what happened after the tiniest little dot caught his eye—to the shouted chorus (which I imagined turning into two different narrative voices—Person A: “There is no you” and Person B: “There is only me”—in a remix I was envisioning after Trent released the GarageBand file to the song), there isn’t much I don’t like about “Only”. As I’ve stated before, I am huge fan of PHM-era NIN. But therein lies the problem with “Only.” I think this is a song that would be more at home on PHM than it is on the somewhat disjointed (although mostly satisfying) With Teeth.

Listen: I think my brother’s opinion of “Only” (and of “The Hand That Feeds,” which we wasn’t fond of either) is well-founded. There was something jarring about “THTF” and “Only” leading the charge for the new NIN after two albums worth of more sonically layered and lyrically deeper songs (The Downward Spiral and The Fragile). I think that, eventually, in looking back on the NIN catalog, “THTF” and “Only” may be viewed with same sense of scorn with which fans like my NIN-ouevreblogging colleague at This Machine is Obsolete view “Sanctified.” I can see a day when Trent refuses to play either track live—he’s certainly got enough other songs to play by this point—just as he appears to be patently against playing “Sanctified.” But I think that’ll be a shame, because both songs are good songs. They’re just songs out of time, and out of place.

* My brother had gay friends in high school, when that simply was not cool, and several of my best friends in college were gay. So please don’t get on me about this being a homophobic post. As Tom Cruise’s character in Jerry Maguire might say, if keeping a client depended on it, “I love gay people!” And that means I’m allowed to call things “gay.” Seriously. Go call PETA, and ask them. They’ll tell you so.

Or is that GLAAD you’re supposed to call? Damn, dude. I’m such a homo for not remembering.

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