Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor discussed the death of his friend and hero David Bowie in a new interview with The Current’s Mary Lucia. Alternative Nation transcribed Reznor’s comments regarding Bowie.
“We weren’t in contact all the time, but knowing he was there was a source of strength and inspiration. As you suddenly realize, I’m an adult now, I’m a grown up, and I’ve got a family now, and I’m still trying to find my path as an artist. [For] a number of those things, I would look to him in a way as a kind of North Star.
Here’s someone who can do those things, it came out of a period of darkness, but he was always on the right side of things. Knowing that he was out there was a source of inspiration and strength.
As I’ve said elsewhere, he’s one of the very few people who exceeded whatever unrealistic expectations I placed on him as a fan perusing album covers and every interview I could find about him, whatever I projected him to be.
When I was finally lucky enough to actually meet and perform and get to know, hang out, he surpassed all of that. You probably know how rare that is when that takes places. He was a very important person to me.”
Nine Inch Nails and David Bowie toured together in the mid 90’s, and they also teamed up for a version of Bowie’s hit “I’m Afraid of Americans.” Nine Inch Nails have performed a cover of Bowie’s “I Can’t Give Everything Away” off of Blackstar at recent shows.
They debuted the cover at a show in Bakersfield, CA. Reznor said at that show, “This is our first show in about three years, I think. We’ve been holed up in a cave making albums and scores. What’s happening in the outside world, everything’s okay? I won’t talk about fucking Trump, I promise.
It’s been awhile since we’ve played a show. At the beginning of last year we lost someone who was very important to us, and me personally, David Bowie. We were in the studio kind of messing around, and it felt like we needed to do something, to process it in some way, so we worked on a song of his that gave us some sort of closure. It felt good to us, we didn’t release it, but we’ll play it for you now.”
