Trent Reznor Planning ‘Nine Inch Nails Stuff’ Following ‘Watchmen’ + ‘Soul’ Scores
In a new interview, musician Trent Reznor revealed he's making plans for future Nine Inch Nails work following his musical obligations to HBO TV series Watchmen and an upcoming Pixar movie.
As causal listeners may not know, Reznor and his musical partner (and fellow Nine Inch Nails member) Atticus Ross experienced much success composing incidental music after scoring a stretch of David Fincher films. Since then, they've helmed the soundtrack to Netflix thriller Bird Box and many other film and TV projects. Although they're currently working on music for HBO's Watchmen series and the score to Pixar's upcoming computer-animated adventure Soul, the musician said he and his cohort are setting their sights on Nine Inch Nails' next move after those two projects are complete.
"Right now, we are finishing up Watchmen, and we're working on the Pixar film that we are doing," Reznor told Rolling Stone in the interview published Tuesday (Nov. 5). "And we have plans for Nine Inch Nails stuff, but we haven't got down to doing it because literally every minute of the day for the last several months has been working on score stuff. But the plan is to do stuff, yes."
Elsewhere in the chat, the Nine Inch Nails frontman explained his ideas behind the group's contemporary release strategy. The act's latest musical efforts rolled out in three distinct chunks — Not the Actual Events (2016), Add Violence (2017) and Bad Witch (2018). It's a tactic the musician wished he could retroactively apply to the band's hefty 1999 album The Fragile.
"If I could put The Fragile out again, I'd break it into two albums," Reznor admitted. "I think back then, 20 years ago, it was a little self-important to drop something of that length and density on people, but the last three mini records we put out were actually one album. The music, I felt, in no way was dumbed down."
The musician also discussed his early beginnings in songwriting with Nine Inch Nails. Before breaking onto the scene with 1989's Pretty Hate Machine, the artist recalled his first attempts to emulate the Clash.
"It eventually started to make sense what Nine Inch Nails could be," Reznor remembered. "I asked myself what I, as a songwriter, had to say. What was something that I could say with authenticity? I started out trying to imitate the Clash — shitily. I'm not the Clash; I didn't have anything smart to say politically, back then — or now for that matter. But when I turned to my journal and I realized I was writing song lyrics anyway, once I got over the hump of, 'I could never say that out loud to other people,' there was an authenticity there and truthfulness that I think resonated."
Last month, the Nine Inch Nails mastermind explained why he changed his mind about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame after being critical of the institution in the past. Around the same time, the musician said he was flattered that rapper Lil Nas X used a Nine Inch Nails sample in the hit "Old Town Road."
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