New Ipod issues

I've had an ipod forever that I've used for music. I know I'm showing my age, but the one I used for years was a 3rd Generation one, and I loved it. Love it still. But it began the process of dying this past winter. Today the touch screen finally stopped working properly.

My parents got me a brand new one for Christmas, a 7th Generation one (or whatever is the newest). The thing is, I really hate the new setup of it. I hate that it has so many things on it besides music that aren't easily removable and seems to basically be set up like a phone. I just want a music player. And with the other one, I liked to hold it sometimes and use the volume on the touch screen, but there is no easy way to do that on the new one because the volume bar is too close to other buttons that my finger will brush against. And sometimes when I'm just listening it randomly closes out of the music app and switches to a different app on the screen even though the music is still playing. It isn't very intuitive at all.

Is there any way to change the setup to make it closer to the old model? Or at least to get rid of more of the phone-like features so this can be just the music player I want it to be? I have a phone. I don't need another. I just want to play music. I just happen to have a lot of it (actually way more than the 120 gigs this Ipod has), which is a big reason why I go for ipods rather than any other type of player.