The song “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X set the record recently for the longest running number one song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Normally we probably wouldn’t care, but since the song actually samples a part of a Nine Nails Song it actually makes things interesting. The song that is sampled is called “34 Ghosts IV” and it comes off the Nine Inch Nails album that Trent co-wrote with Atticus Ross Ghosts I-IV. Taking to Rolling Stone Trent said:
“At first when you hear your stuff turned into something else, it always feels awkward because it’s something that intimately came from you in some way.”
He adds that he had similar feelings when Johnny Cash covered “Hurt.”
“You feel a little bit violated, you know? And then you get over that and you realize it’s become something else and the Johnny Cash thing is incredible. It’s very flattering. The music from Ghosts that turned into ‘Old Town Road’ certainly didn’t come from as intimate a place as the song ‘Hurt’ did, but it’s still something that I remember what I was thinking about when we did it, and then you hear it turned into this other thing — it feels strange at first. But I thought he did a good job with that.”
But what was his intial reaction to finding out that one of songs had been sampled for this song?
“The way it was presented to me originally is I got a call from my management saying, ‘We got a call from a panicked manager saying they had used the sample of something off Ghosts,’” Reznor recalls. “‘They should have cleared it, but it didn’t get cleared. It’s picking up some steam on the viral Spotify charts. What do you think about that?’ And I said, ‘Look, I’m fine with it. I get how stuff goes. They’re not saying they didn’t sample it. Just work it out, but don’t be a roadblock to this.’ I hadn’t heard it yet. Then a few weeks later, I was like, ‘Holy shit.’”
