As always, Trent Reznor has a lot on his plate. In a new interview with the Associated Press, he touches on everything he has going on. He made his first public comment (besides this tweet) on Apple’s acquisition of Beats. “It kind of caught me by surprise but I’ve had time to think about it,” he said. “Always having had an immense amount of respect for Apple, it’s a tremendous opportunity, and we can continue the mission that sort of fascinated me in the first place, which was to try to create a place where people can listen to music and actually elevate that experience. To be able to do it with the scope and scale of Apple, that keeps me interested very much.” He said that he views himself as a “futurist” and thinks that “music deserves to be treated as the fine art that it is” and that Beats is the way to do that in the digital realm.

He also talked about the upcoming Nine Inch Nails/Soundgarden tour, which recently had to come up with some new opening bands after Death Grips dropped out. He promises a more restrained production and a change to the number of musicians in his backing band. “It’s not bombast. It’s not, ‘Look at these technical things we can do.’ It’s not the explosions and fire or putting robots in space, overwhelming you with spectacle.”

Finally, he talked about his score for David Fincher’s Gone Girl, which sees him collaborating once again with Atticus Ross. He says that Fincher makes all of the final decisions and that “it’s kind of fun not to be the top of the pyramid and looking at somebody that I really respect and saying, ‘How can I help?'”

[Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty.]