The tour that made Trent Reznor hate touring: “I’m bored”
Even though most musicians pursue their chosen career path for the love of the craft, it’s rare that they enjoy absolutely all aspects of the job, and while Trent Reznor may tell you how much he loves being in the studio, he certainly doesn’t always feel the same about being on the road.
It’s understandable that this is his perspective; in the studio, you can tinker with ideas and polish and perfect them and spend as much time as you wish, and considering how close the attention to detail always is on his projects, whether that’s his work with Nine Inch Nails or as a composer, you can imagine that he likes to spend as much time as possible refining all aspects of his output.
On the road, however, you’re painstakingly repeating the same things night after night, and punctuating every performance with long stretches of travel rather than being able to develop new ideas. Of course, some acts are able to keep writing regardless, but this isn’t a method that everyone finds easy to follow, and Reznor is not one who likes to sit down in the green room as a place to conjure up material for his next project.
While Nine Inch Nails have often been celebrated for their visceral live performances, after several years of being on tour, there was one in particular that tested Reznor’s patience and ultimately dissuaded him from ever embarking on another one of a similar nature.
During a 2007 interview with Wired, he expressed his frustrations with how a previous record cycle saw the band go on a tour that meant he was away from the comfort of his studio surroundings for long periods at a time, and while there would have been opportunities for him to come up with other ideas during his down-time, it proved to simply be an impossible situation to navigate.
“On my end, what had happened was I was on tour from 2005-ish,” he explained, “[We] toured for about a year and a half, almost two years for the With Teeth album, and while on tour I realised, ‘OK, I’m bored’.” While boredom is a perfectly good excuse for not wanting to be on tour, it’s quite damning to suggest that performing to your fanbase night after night gets tedious.
“You know, it’s fun to play that two hours a day, but the rest of the time is kind of wasted. I started messing about […] I’d never had any luck writing music on tour because I never had the kind of attention span,” he admitted.
It’s the exact sort of thing that’s really going to make you want to never go on tour again, and given how the studio appears to be a safe haven for artists like Reznor and any others who like to fine-tune their work to satisfaction, two years is a long time to starve yourself of this. Thankfully, he’s found a good compromise, and Nine Inch Nails continue to perform across the world, but there’s no way he’ll ever find himself embarking on a tour of this length again.
