NIN Bassist Quits Ahead Of Tour

Nine Inch Nails bassist Eric Avery has quit the band, saying he’s been “overwhelmed” by the number of tour dates the band has booked for its next tour.

Avery made his name as the founding bassist of Jane’s Addiction, and wants to refocus his work on producing film scores instead of going through another intense tour shortly after getting back from the road with Garbage.

“It’s with very mixed emotions I tell you all that I’m pulling out of NIN. I know. Its been a tough call and I don’t know if it’s the right one. But I really want to focus on my musical life here in LA, on film work in particular,” he told fans on his Facebook page.

He continued: “As the tour dates kept growing … I just got overwhelmed. I just got home from a year of heavy travel with Garbage, the idea of leaving town for another year and a half, and with all the intensity that Nails demands.

“Fortunately my friend Trent [Reznor] understands all this and appreciated my pulling the plug now instead of deep into 2013 and 14. Go get ’em gentlemen.”

NIN have a series of summer festival dates announced, but are yet to announce full world tour details.

Fans can look forward to a couple of tracks of new material on the tour which frontman Trent Reznor wrote with new bandmate Adrian Belew of King Crimson fame, but he tells NME that there are no plans for a new album yet. Instead, this series of live shows will see a new kind of experimentation.

“The intention is to reconstruct songs based on this new instrumentation and only play songs we as a band feel good about. With Nine Inch Nails last time, I felt that I’d explored that kind of bludgeoning rock thing in a lot of different ways, like I’d done everything I could do with that format,” said Reznor.