Trent Reznor Nine Quotations

A lot of what I've done as Nine Inch Nails has been governed by fear. I was trying to keep the songs in a framework that was tough, and I learnt a lot from Jesus and Mary Chain about how to bury nice pop songs in unlistenable noise - the idea being if you can get behind that wall, you find there's a pearl inside.

Self-examination with a close-up mirror in an antiseptic environment is what Nine Inch Nails is based on.

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 like the idea of working in an album-sized chunk, you know, and I never looked at Nine Inch Nails as a project that would be a hit-driven, single-based kind of thing.

In Nine Inch Nails, I've been the guy calling the shots since inception. I'd gotten used to that.

There's always been an element of 'right time, right place' to Nine Inch Nails. When we stepped onstage at Woodstock '94, I could sense it. I get goosebumps thinking about it now. Like, 'I don't know how we did this, but somehow we've touched a nerve.'

As long as it feels valid to me and feels sincere, I'll do what I do under the moniker of Nine Inch Nails if it's appropriate. I would hate to think I would ever be in a position where I'm faking it to get a paycheck.

It probably wasn't until Nine Inch Nails played the first Lollapalooza that I actually went to a festival.

Nine Inch Nails was born out of Cleveland, Ohio, with me and a friend in a studio working on demos at night. Got a record deal with a small, little label, went on tour in a van, and a couple years later found that somehow we touched a nerve, and that first record resonated with a bunch of people.

Nine Inch Nails is like building an army to go conquer. We build it, then we play, and we have to play so much to validate building it, financially. It leads to getting burn-out because a tour that would be fun if it lasted three weeks has to last 15 weeks.

I'm sure there is a group of people that assume Nine Inch Nails is just noise and chaos - or whatever it might be dismissed as, and sometimes is.

I lived a fairly average, anonymous small-town life till I got the idea to do Nine Inch Nails. Then I locked myself in a studio for a year, and then got off the tour bus two years after that, and I didn't know who I'd turned into.

We've put extra effort into developing this program as an effective way to ensure that Nine Inch Nails fans get into the show with the best possible tickets. The only complaints will be from scalpers and those who want to put our true fans at a disadvantage.