Lindsey on new Nine Inch Nails album

[shackin'up]

Originally Posted by Macfanforever

I'm not into their tunes though .I have to say they did a great job covering the Johnny Cash tune "Hurt" .

That's a joke I presume? Johnny covered NIN. But I think I'm thrashing your witty remark now. Sorry. If not: Hurt is a NIN-tune. Cash loved it and covered it.

[shackin'up]

I'm passionately happy with this collaboration. I hope he's shredding the roof of on his Turner. maybe he didn't and added fingerpicked tapestry.

Whatever he did, this is what I've been hoping for. For years. Lindsey hooking up with Indie artists like Reznor, Jack White, Sonic Youth, Corgan, Ryan Adams, Greg Dulli, New Pornographers etcetera.

I love it. Love it. Love it.

[Stormwind]

Wow! Nice to see Lindsey in this musical aspect, If I were a member of NIN I would be trembling...

[michelej1]

[Lindsey on three songs]

Pitchfork By Jenn Pelly on July 25, 2013

http://pitchfork.com/news/51656-tren...-making-sense/

In just over a month, we'll have a new LP from Nine Inch Nails-- Hesitation Marks, out September 3 through Columbia. In support of the record, they'll embark on a massive arena tour this fall-- their first since 2009-- preceded by several summer festivals. Reznor has now given an interview with The New York Times detailing what those shows will be like.

According to Reznor, the stage set-- with "smoke, strobe lights, video screens on wheels"-- was directly inspired by the 1983 Talking Heads tour documented in the film Stop Making Sense. Adrian Belew, who played in Talking Heads' band on that tour, was briefly a member of the current Nine Inch Nails' touring band, and appears on Hesitation Marks.

The new show begins with Reznor, alone, before his band slowly takes form around him on stage. The lights and visuals, which are choreographed, then begin. Roy Bennett, lighting/production designer for Nine Inch Nails, told The Times, "We've always tried to make people think and keep them on edge and keep them wondering what’s going on."

This elaborate set is being built for this summer's festival shows, and will be drastically changed for the fall arena tour. Reznor told The Times, "The fact that we’re doing all this only for these few shows, and then we have to do it over again, throwing all this out to do a completely new thing, with new things that won’t work, that feels a little insane."

Nine Inch Nails' first comeback appearance will be at Fuji Rock Festival in Japan tomorrow. As the NIN Hotline points out, their set will be streamed live on YouTube. It will start at 9:30 pm Japan time (8:30 a.m. eastern).

According to The Times' Jon Pareles, Hesitation Marks "sounds radically different" from Nine Inch Nails' most recent albums. Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac ended up playing on three songs. Reznor had 1994's The Downward Spiral in mind while writing, and called the album "sparse" and minimal." Reznor continued:


I don’t think it’s a gentle record. I do think it’s more subversive in how it gets you. It’s not about everything being at 11 and the pyrotechnics of sound and scare tactics, which I’ve definitely used in the past. But it doesn’t feel like the middle-aged, I’ve-given-up record either.

Watch the David Lynch-directed video for "Came Back Haunted":

[michelej1]

[Oy, Lindsey don't start with the painting again. Can you compare your music to something else? How about mopping? Lindsey in Hawaii]

New York Times, July 28, 2013 [this is an excerpt] by Jon Pareles

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/ar..._r=1&ref=arts&

Early in the recording process, Mr. Reznor brought in collaborators from outside the usual sphere. He recorded extensively with the guitarist Adrian Belew, who had worked with David Bowie and King Crimson and was part of Talking Heads’ “Stop Making Sense” band. (Mr. Belew joined, then left, the tour rehearsals. “It didn’t work,” he wrote on Facebook.) Mr. Reznor also did sessions with the bassist Pino Palladino, who had helped construct the slinky grooves on D’Angelo’s album “Voodoo,” and with Lindsey Buckingham, Fleetwood Mac’s guitarist.

Mr. Buckingham and Mr. Reznor spent one day in the studio, with Mr. Buckingham jamming on multiple tracks; his playing ended up in three songs. “There was a bit of a kindred spirit there even though the styles were different,” Mr. Buckingham said by telephone from Hawaii. “His process was something like a painting process like I work, where you’re slopping colors around and looking for clues, and it becomes a subconscious process in which the work reveals itself to you.”

As the album took shape, surprising songs emerged. One, “Find My Way,” is an overt prayer. And the album’s final song with words, “While I’m Still Here,” faces up to mortality yet ends up with thoughts not of apocalypse or alienation, but of quiet connection: “Stay with me, hold me near, while I’m still here,” Mr. Reznor sings

[michelej1]

With the Nine Inch Nails playing the festivals and Lindsey on vacation right now, I wonder if he might make a cameo on stage with them.

Michele

[elle]

Originally Posted by michelej1

With the Nine Inch Nails playing the festivals and Lindsey on vacation right now, I wonder if he might make a cameo on stage with them.

Michele

with him being in HI (per that phone interview above) plus most of their dates being outside the US, the only possible date i could see is SF date, but i'm thinking he'd probably still be in HI at that time...

http://tour.nin.com/

[michelej1]

[From this Spin article excerpt, we know all of Lindsey's 3 songs. but it would have been fun to see you guys figure out where he was like on This is 40, when we didn't already know he was on that Norah Jones song]

http://www.spin.com/#articles/nine-i...e-debut-video/

Nine Inch Nails have already shared the synth-scorched single "Came Back Haunted" (and its David Lynch-directed video), and last week they debuted the Lindsey Buckingham-guesting album's fellow songs "Copy of A" and "Find My Way" live in Japan.

[elle]

Originally Posted by michelej1

[From this Spin article excerpt, we know all of Lindsey's 3 songs. but it would have been fun to see you guys figure out where he was like on This is 40, when we didn't already know he was on that Norah Jones song]

http://www.spin.com/#articles/nine-i...e-debut-video/

Nine Inch Nails have already shared the synth-scorched single "Came Back Haunted" (and its David Lynch-directed video), and last week they debuted the Lindsey Buckingham-guesting album's fellow songs "Copy of A" and "Find My Way" live in Japan.

i don't read this as revealing 3 exact songs LB is on. also looking at where they linked to, they are talking about LB-guesting-album not LB-guesting-songs, it seems. although it can go either way.

[michelej1]

Originally Posted by elle

i don't read this as revealing 3 exact songs LB is on. also looking at where they linked to, they are talking about LB-guesting-album not LB-guesting-songs, it seems. although it can go either way.

I guess. When I saw "fellow songs," I thought it meant they all shared a common attribute, but I suppose the common attribute is that they're all on the same album.

Michele

[michelej1]

So, game still on. We get Hesitation Marks and, without reading the liner notes, we guess where Lindsey is. Although not me, because I never know anything like that. But you guys who can tell.

Michele

[michelej1]

http://www.nme.com/news/nine-inch-nails/72126

Nine Inch Nails have revealed new track 'Everything', the latest song from new album 'Hesitation Marks'. See above to hear the song in full, now.
Read more at http://www.nme.com/news/nine-inch-na...W1QRdhj9X4d.99

[shackin'up]

Last friday I saw Nine Inch Nails live om the Lowlandsfestival. It was so overwhelmingly good that I could not concentrate on what could have been LB in the mix

[HelloMonster]

Originally Posted by shackin'up

Last friday I saw Nine Inch Nails live om the Lowlandsfestival. It was so overwhelmingly good that I could not concentrate on what could have been LB in the mix

I'm so envious! I'm still trying for tickets here, for their show in Sept.. Seems like you and I are the only ones excited for this

[michelej1]

[Lindsey is quoted below. Yeah, Trent knows what is good for him. No aggressive personae better try to push LB around. Not having it.]

Spin Magazine, September Cover story. Written By David MarcheseAugust 25 2013, 7:44 PM ET

http://www.spin.com/#featured/trent-...eptember-2013/

Trent Reznor's Upward Spiral

The Nine Inch Nails leader found love, won an Oscar, and walked away from his band and major labels. But with NIN's new 'Hesitation Marks,' the former dark prince of alt-rock (and current family man) returns to a digital universe he helped create.

This summer — Nine Inch Nails' first as a living, breathing entity in four years — Trent Reznor has been taking the stage alone. Muscular and short-haired, he opens his shows by marching to a synthesizer in full view of tens of thousands of festivalgoers, all of whom had strong reason to believe they might never see this band again. Usually wearing a sleeveless black t-shirt, heavy boots, and cargo shorts, he begins to sing the stealthy "Copy of A," a track from Hesitation Marks, the imminent new NIN album those same festivalgoers had equally strong reason to believe might never exist.

"That moment is our reintroduction," says Reznor, seated on a red leather couch in a conference room at Hollywood's posh Soho House, a cocktail-jazz version of Nirvana's "Lithium" clinking quietly in the background. "It's supposed to challenge the audience. I didn't want to come out and signal that we're just a band playing songs you know we're going to play."

He cocks his head, as if considering a problem he's still in the process of solving. "I haven't had a chance to live with the show yet, so it's hard for me to tell what people think."

Indeed, these things take time, but over nearly a quarter-century of Nine Inch Nails, Reznor has learned that if you tackle the hardest things first, the rest of it has a way of working out.

For roughly 80 percent of the band's existence, a bet on Trent Reznor sitting in a room like this discussing his career in early August 2013 would've drawn long odds. The reasons range from the mundane (his industrial baby-step years spent in Cleveland) to the medical (a personally confused, chemically indulgent '90s) to the plainly literal (a burnt-out Reznor told a 2009 Bonnaroo crowd, "This is our last-ever show in the United States").

Yet here we are, in a brief window between gala appearances at Lollapalooza and San Francisco's fellow multi-day extravaganza Outside Lands, with gigs on the European muddy-field circuit approaching quickly, and solo North American arena dates looming on the horizon.

"I'm at a peak of exhaustion right now," says Reznor, who minus a scowl (and plus some longer pants) largely retains his onstage guise offstage. He's sipping from both a cup of coffee and a can of Diet Coke, and is a polite, even friendly presence, firm with his handshake and quick with a smile. "I was shooting a video till three in the morning. The last few weeks have been terribly intense. The way I work is that up to the last second stuff looks like ****, and at the last minute it comes together. But I feel like I've done good work, and there's still an audience there. I'm not looking out at the crowd and seeing a bunch of orthodontists. It's new faces that look like the old ones, if that makes any sense. It feels valid to be back."

That's because more than at any time since the release of 1994's self-loathing alt-angst classic The Downward Spiral — an album to which Hesitation Marks ruefully nods across the decades — Nine Inch Nails, and their formerly tortured and wraithlike leader, once again have the zeitgeist on a leash. The man who once made it a mission to jolt rock beyond its guitar/bass/drums doldrums has delivered a heavily electronic LP into a world where binary code is now just accepted as what makes music go. The band's ticket sales are stronger than ever, and the David Lynch-directed video for self-reflexive first single "Came Back Haunted" quickly earned more than two million YouTube views. Reznor's sound — confrontational, fiercely technological, pretty damn catchy — now reverberates through the banging aggression of American dubstep and the visceral clang of so much contemporary hip-hop.

For English producer Evian Christ, who contributed to Kanye West's electronically noisy Yeezus, "There's been a resurgence in the influence" of Reznor-indebted music. "I'll always be grateful to Trent for sparking my interest in music that I would otherwise never have been aware of." And in a period when the digital world is throwing off the brightest, sexiest creative sparks, Reznor has diversified, pointing his sharp mind at the puzzle of streaming music, working with Beats by Dre to develop what the company hopes will be the ultimate subscription-based music service, due to launch in a limited fashion this fall.

But Reznor knows better than most that riding these socio-cultural waves is as much a matter of luck as sweat. "There's always been an element of 'right time, right place' to Nine Inch Nails," he says. "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.' And then as you move forward, you realize that you can't set yourself up for doing that again. So the fact that our music may or may not be in the air now and people seem eager for it, and that I'm working on something with Beats that's a marriage of humanity and technology, which is sort of what my music has always been about, and I'm doing this after years of working on my own trying to figure out how best to get music to the people who want to hear it — you can't plan for those things. It's just the way the world works."

At some point in the not-too-distant future, Trent Reznor's sons, two-year-old Lazarus and one-year-old Balthazar, are going to hear their father sing "Closer," complete with its chorus of "I wanna **** you like an animal."

He's been airing that song in concert these days, and admits he hasn't quite thought through the long-term implications. "When I was 25, people used to say to me that having kids would change you, and I'd roll my eyes," says Reznor, who married singer Mariqueen Maandig in October 2009. "I don't know what it'll be like when they read old stories about my addiction or listen to the older songs. I do know that I caught myself swearing in front of them during a road-rage moment and was worried they'd parrot it back."

He shakes his head. "It's a humbling thing, having kids. One of my sons came to rehearsals, and now he says Daddy's job is 'go play loud music.'"

That job, and Daddy's relationship to it, is very different now. While Reznor takes pains to point out that he'd only ever said that Nine Inch Nails were taking a break from touring — the band had been on the road almost constantly from 2005 to 2009 — he does admit that his attitude about the project that made him rich and famous had profoundly shifted.

"The main thing was that I didn't want to be on an endless rock-band tour with Nine Inch Nails," he says. "And I said that adamantly enough to force my hand at trying something new. It was like with getting sober: I announced to the world that I was sober so that I'd be held accountable. What I feel bad about is that this is some 'KISS Final Tour of Mid-2013' idea. I get that people might feel that way, but I've given up on trying to manage the spin on things. Nine Inch Nails felt right for me to do, and that's because it felt uncomfortable in a lot of ways. That's usually a sign for me that something might be interesting."

He last felt such seductive discomfort shortly after getting off the road in 2009, when director David Fincher approached him and Reznor collaborator Atticus Ross about scoring 2010's The Social Network. "The process of working on that was surprisingly great," Reznor says. "It was like the first Nine Inch Nails van tour — some of the most rewarding work I've ever done. At the time I'd just gotten married and was feeling like I was getting old to be touring, and I thought film-scoring could be a reinvention."

Reznor, who relocated from New Orleans to Los Angeles in 2005, won an Oscar for that moody, hypnotic Social Network score, and he and Ross worked with Fincher again on 2011's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But those fulfilling experiences, he explains, were aberrations. "Seeing more about how Hollywood operates, you recognize that making movies is an economic calculation. If, by chance, a high-quality film comes out, that's good, but it's not about executing some great vision. Working with someone as smart as David Fincher isn't normal. I love the idea of making films, and hopefully want to make one of my own someday, but it wasn't a world I wanted to spend more time in."

Wait. So what Trent Reznor really wants to do is direct?

"I'm thinking a super low-brow bro comedy," he says dryly. "I'm into nut humor."

Even while Reznor was scoring the exploits of interpersonally awkward coding moguls and Swedish cyberpunks, he never stopped making music for himself. "Trent is always experimenting in the studio," Ross says. "He doesn't make some big announcement ahead of time and say, 'This fragment will someday be a Nine Inch Nails song,' but I knew that he'd return to Nails eventually."

The more vexing question was what Nine Inch Nails should be in the second decade of the 21st century. Sober, happily married, wildly successful in his other musical pursuits — what reason did Reznor have for bringing the band back to life?

"The unglamorous story is that I owed Interscope a couple of songs for a greatest-hits package," he says bluntly. "I thought that might be a good excuse to try some new things, and 'Satellite' and 'Everything' came out. It was obvious that I would have censored myself from doing things so minimal and pop in the past. That made me think, 'Let's keep chipping away at the crack in the ice. We might fall through, but that prospect is exciting.'"

With the greatest-hits project shelved until 2014, the resulting, all-new Hesitation Marks (those two early tracks included) is both sonically singular and thematically linked to a particular scarred and multi-million-selling predecessor in the Nine Inch Nails catalog. "For some reason, when I started working more on Hesitation Marks, I started thinking back romantically about who I was when I was writing The Downward Spiral," Reznor says. "I was looking back on who I was then and who I am now and how things have turned out, for better or worse. That was the air the new record was born in. I was looking at the other side of how I was not always honest about who I was in the '90s — and I knew I wasn't being honest — and if you sprinkle those negative feelings with some drugs and alcohol, it's usually not a recipe for success."

Except that it was.

"Until the balance got thrown off," corrects Reznor, who successfully completed rehab for drug and alcohol addiction in 2001. "I'm happy with who I am now. I feel fortunate to be where I am. We tried arranging the new songs with loud guitars, and it sounded false. Instead, we approached those old emotions in new ways that are subtler, and I think just as powerful."

Adorned with art by Downward Spiral cover designer Russell Mills and heavily influenced by the spare, rhythmically complex feel of D'Angelo's Voodoo, the result is as sleek an album as Nine Inch Nails have ever made. Lead single "Came Back Haunted" squirms on the strength of a simple drum-machine pattern, scuffed synth wash, and sequenced bass; the laser-like "Everything" could be a lost Joy Division seven-inch, complete with a chorus wherein Reznor sings (not screams), "I have tried everything / I've survived everything." But instead of sounding like a furious regret, the line hits as hard-won wisdom.

"We tried not to do the classic Nine Inch Nail things on the album," says co-producer Alan Moulder, who has worked with Reznor going back to The Downward Spiral. "The old trademark with Trent was that when we got to the chorus, the songs go up a step, he sings in his highest range possible, and a million guitars come in. We tried to do the opposite on this one. The choruses actually go down; the sound is more withheld than explosive, which is a much harder thing to do."

The album is also a more insinuating, collaborative sound, a long way from the hermetic sonic phantasmagorias of 1992's landmark Broken EP or 1999's double-disc behemoth The Fragile. "In the past," says longtime NIN visual collaborator Rob Sheridan, "Trent would bring in a violin player and give him something very specific to do. This time, he'd bring in Lindsey Buckingham and say, 'Let's see what he'll come up with.' That's a radical change in approach."

For his part, Buckingham recalls there being a "great sense of calm in the studio. Trent's got this aggressive persona, but then he turns out to be this laid-back, soft-spoken guy putting things together in a very painterly
way."

Reznor also enlisted former David Bowie and Talking Heads sideman Adrian Belew and D'Angelo studio bassist Pino Palladino, among others, for Hesitation Marks, and though things still aren't perfect — Belew has since bowed out of the NIN touring production, telling reporters, simply, "It didn't work" — the overall change in dynamics is still pronounced. "There's a lot less face-punching in the songs now," Reznor says. "I'm not as afraid of judgments as I used to be. I just want to do the best I can do, and not squander any more time than I already have when I was high. That's my main concern. If you don't like the music or think I should be someone I'm not, fine."

He juts his chin out defiantly. "But I'm still competitive," he says. "If I'm going to do this, I want to win."

In the time between 2007's Year Zero (released on Interscope) and Hesitation Marks (released on Columbia), Trent Reznor hocked a lot of thick loogies in the direction of major labels. Publicly and repeatedly, he chided them for sticking their collective heads in the sand with regards to file-sharing. He thought that the suits were more inclined to sue fans than serve them. So he left.

"At Interscope, it felt like we were one of 50 bands, and we didn't sell as much as Eminem, so no one cared about us," Reznor says, having finished the coffee and moved on to the Diet Coke. "Combine that with unquestionably wrong move after wrong move in terms of the response to new technologies — I just felt like I could figure things out better than they could."

He was correct, up to a point. 2008's raw, jittery The Slip, offered for free on the NIN website, was downloaded 2.4 million times; a lavish, pricey physical package sold in the neighborhood of 250,000 copies. (That same year, he also offered the instrumental ambient collection Ghosts under his own Null Corporation umbrella.)

"Being in control of your own destiny was great," he says of the decision to go indie. "It felt good to have my own neck on the line. But you spend a lot of time figuring out who the influential blogger at some radio station is. Market research is not a sexy thing to think about. More than that, when you're self-releasing, you have this walled garden of people that are interested in what you do, and to everyone else you're invisible."

Meanwhile, as he sought to extend the boundaries of his fan base, he was reconsidering his role as a public figure.

"I was excited about Twitter when we went out on our own because it felt like the most direct way to penetrate people's attention," says Reznor, an early and eager adopter of the platform, who in his mid-aughts guise was quick to volley with fans and fire shots at fellow musicians. "I also got a charge out of people realizing that I wasn't a recluse sleeping in a coffin. But in hindsight, my experimenting with Twitter was a mistake. Oversharing feels vulgar to me now. I know we've been fooled into thinking it's okay to show dick pics and that the Kardashians' behavior is normal, but it's not. I've tuned out in the last couple years. Everybody's got a ****ing opinion. It takes courage to put something out creatively into the world, and then to see it get trampled on by ****s? It's destructive."

There's another factor to Reznor's more cautious approach to social media: "I've had the experience over the last few years of liking bands, and then checking what they're up to on Tumblr or something, and immediately realizing, 'This is you?' ****.' I don't want my personality to get in the way of what I'm trying to do musically."

Oversharing feels vulgar to me now. I know we've been fooled into thinking it's okay to show dick pics and that the Kardashians' behavior is normal, but it's not. ”

In the time between 2007's Year Zero (released on Interscope) and Hesitation Marks (released on Columbia), Trent Reznor hocked a lot of thick loogies in the direction of major labels. Publicly and repeatedly, he chided them for sticking their collective heads in the sand with regards to file-sharing. He thought that the suits were more inclined to sue fans than serve them. So he left.

"At Interscope, it felt like we were one of 50 bands, and we didn't sell as much as Eminem, so no one cared about us," Reznor says, having finished the coffee and moved on to the Diet Coke. "Combine that with unquestionably wrong move after wrong move in terms of the response to new technologies — I just felt like I could figure things out better than they could."

He was correct, up to a point. 2008's raw, jittery The Slip, offered for free on the NIN website, was downloaded 2.4 million times; a lavish, pricey physical package sold in the neighborhood of 250,000 copies. (That same year, he also offered the instrumental ambient collection Ghosts under his own Null Corporation umbrella.)

"Being in control of your own destiny was great," he says of the decision to go indie. "It felt good to have my own neck on the line. But you spend a lot of time figuring out who the influential blogger at some radio station is. Market research is not a sexy thing to think about. More than that, when you're self-releasing, you have this walled garden of people that are interested in what you do, and to everyone else you're invisible."

Meanwhile, as he sought to extend the boundaries of his fan base, he was reconsidering his role as a public figure.

"I was excited about Twitter when we went out on our own because it felt like the most direct way to penetrate people's attention," says Reznor, an early and eager adopter of the platform, who in his mid-aughts guise was quick to volley with fans and fire shots at fellow musicians. "I also got a charge out of people realizing that I wasn't a recluse sleeping in a coffin. But in hindsight, my experimenting with Twitter was a mistake. Oversharing feels vulgar to me now. I know we've been fooled into thinking it's okay to show dick pics and that the Kardashians' behavior is normal, but it's not. I've tuned out in the last couple years. Everybody's got a ****ing opinion. It takes courage to put something out creatively into the world, and then to see it get trampled on by ****s? It's destructive."

There's another factor to Reznor's more cautious approach to social media: "I've had the experience over the last few years of liking bands, and then checking what they're up to on Tumblr or something, and immediately realizing, 'This is you?' ****.' I don't want my personality to get in the way of what I'm trying to do musically."

There's been a lot of change in the life of Nine Inch Nails, but also some constants. Twenty years and hundreds of performances down a crooked road, Trent Reznor still often chooses to say goodbye to his crowds with "Hurt," the last track on The Downward Spiral, and the song that in its lean, confessional intensity is Hesitation Marks' most direct emotional precursor.

"When I was younger, to hear people singing that song, or any song, back to me? Holy ****, what a great feeling," says Reznor, leaning forward. "Over time, that feeling corrupted me. I didn't feel interesting enough to deserve it, and then I reinvented myself as a caricature. Money creeps in, people want to sleep with you, you distort. Add alcohol and drugs, and things go south fast. A song like 'Hurt' is reinterpreted by who I am now — and I like that person a lot more.

"The person you're talking to now is the real me — the smart, together me from high school," Reznor continues. "I feel so much younger than I am. I wish I could change some things about the path it took to get here, but I feel lucky that I'm not as caught up in anger as I was."

Then a sinister glimmer flashes across his hazel eyes, and Trent Reznor does what he's always done. "Believe me," he says, offering that old unsettling reassurance. "There's still no shortage of things that piss me off."