Allie Goertz Discusses the Journey Behind NIN Tribute Album “Peeled Back”

Every now and again certain things just sync up, and the universe drops a pile of meaning right in your lap. Most often when you aren’t looking for it. For Allie Goertz, this was certainly the case.

Allie is a prominent comedy musician and former editor for Mad magazine. She co-hosted two podcasts (“Everything’s Coming Up Podcast”/”Round Springfield”) and co-authored 100 Things The Simpsons Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die with friend and comedian/writer Julia Prescott.

Allie has released comedy albums named Cosbysweater (2013) and the Rick & Morty concept album Sad Dance Songs (2015). Now, almost ten years later, she’s back with a brand new, more mature, more raw and honest, and dare I say darker version of herself with Peeled Back: A Tribute to Nine Inch Nails (NIN), produced by Adam Busch & Allie Goertz and string arrangements by Jonathan Dinerstein, Allie Goertz, and Rebecca Ward. Peeled Back offers cinematic, yet stripped down, spacious renditions of 15 carefully curated songs from the NIN catalog.

I sat down with Allie Goertz to talk about Peeled Back, the journey, the inspiration, the meaning, and the music. During our very fun conversation, she had mentioned that she discovered NIN very late in life. Allie did not grow up listening to NIN; she knew Trent Reznor as an artist and composer but “…did not know Trent Reznor was NIN… which is insane! I listened to The Social Network score just about every single day. It’s just the perfect writing soundtrack to have on in the background, and it’s so funny to me that I have been listening to that for years and years and years before I realized ‘oh that’s my guy!’”

Allie shared that she had gone through a break up, and at the time, NIN’s music just resonated perfectly with her. Trent’s music struck a nerve and ignited her passions to create again, and this time, it was personal. “When I’m in long-term relationships, I feel like the first thing that kind of goes out the window when I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to give up to make time for the person that I am sharing my life with, it unfortunately tends to be music. And so when my relationship started to end, I naturally had that kind of pull towards having that excitement again and getting into music again. And that was aligning with hearing NIN for the very first time, as least cognizantly.”

Reflecting her experiences and projecting intimate and special meaning on to a collection of particularly intriguing song choices, Peeled Back is a beautiful, gut wrenching, luxurious, sensual, enigmatic, dangerous, and dirty dance with the devil in the pale moonlight. It takes everything quirky, hilarious, adorable, dream-poppy, and fun about Allie Goertz, and surgically and strategically incorporates that very feral je ne sais quoi feeling you only get from a NIN record. Growing up, I checked out a lot of CDs (those were like shiny flat cassette tapes, kids) from my local library. Silverchair, Green Day, Barenaked Ladies, 311, Weird Al, and of course, every single time NIN – The Downward Spiral was available, I would check that out too. I believe I am personally responsible for making tracks 5 & 6 skip from playing them too much on my discman. (Anti-shock my foot!!) So I do find myself exploring those feelings and emotions and exploring meaning in the songs on Peeled Back, and isn’t that the point of a good tribute album?? I think Allie would agree; “…I really wanted these songs to make people tap into the feeling that I feel when I hear the originals, I just wanted to approach it from my own perspective…”

Peeled Back is streaming everywhere and available on Bandcamp.

You can watch me and Allie talk a lot more in depth about Peeled Back as well as Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022), and I ask some pretty hard-hitting questions… like, “What section of the record store are you going to?” and “What’s up with that?” It’s all here.