Sorry Australian Nine Inch Nails Fans, Trent Reznor Is Done With Touring

Trent Reznor has opened up about his feelings towards touring, the “lack of importance of music in today’s world,” and tearing up while listening to Dua Lipa in a new interview. Sadly for us Nine Inch Nails fans down under, an Australian tour doesn’t look like it’s happening anytime soon.

Appearing on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast, the Closer singer admitted that he feels "grateful" for his career and "appreciative" of his fans, but frequently touring is something that he’s disinterested in. As a father of five with wife Mariqueen Maandig, Reznor said that he doesn’t want to be away from his kids.

“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,” Reznor shared.

Being a dad has “radically shaped every bit of who I am and why I do anything,” he told Rubin, and so the importance of music has taken a back seat on the list of Reznor’s priorities. The influence music has on our lives now, “or lack of importance of music — in today’s world, from my perspective, is a little defeating,” Reznor added.

He explained, “Music used to be the thing that was what I was doing when I had time. I was listening to music. I wasn’t doing it in the background while I was doing five other things.”

Later in the interview, Reznor admitted that he recently found himself tearing up while listening to a Dua Lipa song. “To me, the hardest thing is the songwriting,” he admitted. “Having something to say, something to say with truth, that has reason to exist rather than just a thing.

“I heard my daughter, who’s six, singing Dua Lipa the other day. She is so into it and it is so cool. Like this is her music, you know, this is her thing… It really reminded me of the art of writing a well-crafted song — I teared up listening to a Dua Lipa track. Because it was just a really well-done piece of music, you know? It was clever. It felt good.” 

You can listen to the full interview below.

Nine Inch Nails last toured Australia in March 2014 during a co-headline run with Queens Of The Stone Age. Check out The Music’s Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane reviews.