Balance is good, because one extreme or the other leads to misery, and I've spent a lot of my life at one of those extremes.
Balance is good, because one extreme or the other leads to misery, and I've spent a lot of my life at one of those extremes.
With a Nine Inch Nails show, I'm building on a legacy that comes with a certain set of expectations. I have to push that forward, I have to reinvent myself, I have to feel current and valid.
I've watched with a kind of wary eye how gaming has progressed. I was there at the beginning with Pong in the arcade, and a lot of my great childhood memories were around a 'Tempest' machine.
I doubt I'll ever pay someone to do a remix again, because there's some amazing stuff just coming out of bedrooms.
I think my music's more disturbing than Tupac's - or at least I thought some of the themes of 'The Downward Spiral' were more disturbing on a deeper level - you know, issues about suicide and hating yourself and God and people and everything else.
When I'm on stage, the songs that we've chosen to play from the back catalog are things that still resonate with me, and matter to me. And the songs that I couldn't be a part of, we don't play anymore.
What is exciting is taking back the excitement of being able to debut something to an audience in exactly the way you want to.
I'm very much aware of the dangers of becoming a cliche. Mr. Anger, someone who gets meaner, angrier on record.
In 2010, aside from that niche of music that I have no interest in - Black Eyed Peas territory, disposable pop stuff - there's almost an incentive to go back to making music as adventurous and groundbreaking as you can, because nobody gets a big hit anymore.
I'd much rather be worrying about playing that note in tune, and picking out the best way to arrange the song, rather than thinking about pricing for the download. It's not art.
I aspire to make a record that sounds better 10 listens in than it does after two, and still, at 50 listens, you're picking out things that add a depth and a thoughtfulness to it; there's enough in there that you can still be extracting pieces out of it.
I found that when I was putting my own music out, with my Twitter feed as the pure marketing budget, I'm preaching to the choir.
Live interaction with a crowd is a cathartic, spiritual kind of exchange, and it's intensified at a festival.
I've always been into computers. When I was getting out of high school and forming my identity musically, all of it was really coming into the fold, computers and drum machines. It felt like, you know, I'm in the right place at the right time. I liked the collision.