It's like beating your head open and unzipping your chest cavity saying 'here are my guts - everything I've felt, including a lot of stuff I'm not proud of'. It's hard. It uses you up. I walk off stage sometimes and feel like I've just slept with everybody in the audience. - on performing I write most of my songs when I'm in a bad mood. I thought my goal in life was to be in a successful band, and I had got that, but I was as miserable as I had ever been, and I couldn't understand why that would be. I wanted to escape Small Town USA. To dismiss the boundaries, to explore. My life experience came from watching movies, TV, and reading books and magazines. When your culture comes from watching TV everyday, you're bombarded with images of things that seem cool, places that seem interesting, people who have jobs and careers and opportunities. None of that happened where I was. You're almost taught to realize it's not for you. My dad and I are best friends. He's pretty much responsible for the way I turned out. He would provide a little artistic inspiration here and there in the form of a guitar, stuff like that. I foolishly thought that if I just 'made it' then everything would be okay. And everything wasn't okay. If you look at the most talented filmmakers around right now, David Cronenberg and David Lynch, they had relatively normal upbringings. It doesn't always take exotic, bizarre lifestyles, early-age molestations and prison sentences. When I was five, I got forced into taking piano lessons. And it came really naturally to me. Knowing that I was good at something played an important role in my confidence. I was always shy, uncomfortable around people. I slipped by. But with the music, I didn't. I got into bands. I studied trumpet and saxaphone a little bit. It got to the point where my teacher was like, you can be a concert pianist. But the last thing I wanted to hear at 15 is, well, you're not fitting in now, how about dropping out of school, studying all the time and becoming a concert pianist? It sounds like "penis." Even earlier, Kiss had changed my world. It seemed evil and scary-the embodiment of rebelliousness when you're age 12 and starting to get hair on your balls. Also, my dad, who I'd not lived with since I was 5, got me an electric piano. He had a little music store that sold acoustic instruments in the back room, where me and a couple other guys started jamming in terrible garage bands. I realized that music wasn't all about learning a piece on the piano. The idea of politics is just so uninteresting to me - I've never paid much attention to it. I don't believe things can really change. It doesn't matter who's president. Nothing really gets resolved. I don't know. I guess that's not the right attitude to take. My music has been a sort of personal therapy. It's got me out of tough times, it has been the friend that I needed, when I didn't have a friend there. There are just some things that don't seem very fair in the world, like the hypocrisy of organized religion. I just don't understand how people can blindly believe a bunch of the lies they're fed, to believe it so that they don't think too hard about other issues. 'Be a good boy and you'll go to Heaven.' If it works for you, fine, but it doesn't work for me. An integral part of any relationship is knowing that you could be killed in your sleep at any time. I don't know if you have ever tried to think of band names, but usually you think you have a great one and you look at it the next day and it's stupid. I had about two hundred of those. Nine Inch Nails stood the two week test, looked great in print and could be abbreviated easily. It really does not have a literal meaning. It seemed kinda frightening. It's a curse trying to come up with band names. I would much rather sit in a room by myself than entertain a bunch of people. That's not my style. I become irritated when I am being written off as aloof or stand-offish when I'm shy and don't know what to say. I was raised by my grandparents, the greatest people in the world. I try to tell them, 'You're not going to hear my music on the radio. I'm not going to be on soap operas singing this.' I can imagine what my grandfather tells people: 'It's called Nine Inch Nails -- here's the video. And here he is lying dead at the end of it.' I warned my grandfather that the church might be after him. "I cut my hair now and nobody recognizes me. It's that whole thing I was bitching about earlier - 'I can't go anywhere without someone pointing' - And now it's like, 'Hey, it's me man!' I'm standing in the N section with my laminate on and covered in mud. I just can't get a response anymore." "I think, fundamentally, music is something people love and need and can relate to. A lot of what's out right now feels like McDonalds. It's quick-fix. You kind of have a stomach ache afterwards." "When Nine Inch Nails first got signed, I didn't know how to do interviews. I really still don't. I talk too much and say stupid things."