We may not be seeing Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor live anytime soon. In an in-depth conversation about life and music with producer Rick Rubin on his Tetragrammaton podcast, the musician mentioned the highs and the excitement that being on stage brings but said he’s not interested in extensively touring at the moment.
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“I don’t want to be away from my kids, not that much,” he told Rubin. “I don’t want to miss their lives to go do a thing that I’m grateful to be able to do, and I’m appreciative that you’re here to see it, but I’ve done it a lot, you know? “I kind of want to feel okay and I want to make sure my family’s okay, and that’s great. That’s okay,” he added.
A father of five, Reznor said in the discussion that parenthood has “radically shaped every bit of who I am and why I do anything,” adding that making music today is vastly different for him. “Music used to be the thing that was what I was doing when I had time,” he explained. “I was listening to music. I wasn’t doing it in the background while I was doing five other things.”
In recent years, the artist has ventured into crafting scores for film. He, alongside his longtime collaborator Atticus Ross, has recently scored the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem movie, arriving this August, as well as David Fincher’s upcoming Netflix flick, The Killer, premiering in early November.
Reznor and Ross’ work in film has garnered them a number of accolades, including the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 2010 for Fincher’s The Social Network, and most recently, the same honor for the 2020 Pixar-animated feature Soul.
Elsewhere in the conversation, Reznor revealed he has been working on some things that aren’t music related, but gave little detail as to what that might entail.
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