Metal is magnetic

'Death Magnetic' is the ninth original studio album of Metallica's career — a career in which the band have sold over 100 million albums. Produced by Rick Rubin, 'Death Magnetic' is their first release since 2003's therapy session 'St. Anger' and also the first to feature bassist Robert Trujillo.

Formed in Los Angeles in 1981 by drummer Lars Ulrich and guitarist/vocalist James Hetfield, Metallica are one of the most successful and influential rock bands of all time, with their '80s albums 'Ride The Lightning' and 'Master Of Puppets' classics of the metal genre. Their 1991 album 'Metallica' — known to fans as The Black Album — pushed the group into the mainstream with singles like 'Enter Sandman', 'Sad But True', 'The Unforgiven' and 'Nothing Else Matters' pushing the album to sales of 15 million copies in the US alone.

Following a period in the creative wilderness — which saw the release of the disappointing 'Load' and 'Reload' albums, as well as personal turmoil that almost caused the group's collapse — Metallica are back with their strongest work in 17 years.

Now Hetfield, Ulrich, Trujillo and guitarist Kirk Hammett speak about the making of 'Death Magnetic', working with Rick Rubin, the "cathartic" experiences of 'St. Anger' and 'Some Kind Of Monster', and about their unique relationship with their fans.

Now that Death Magnetic is completed, how do you feel about the album?

Lars Ulrich: My head is still kind of spinning about the whole process, the last couple of years. But everybody who's heard the album says it sounds great, so I'll go along with that! It certainly has a lot of energy, it sounds very lively. One of the key things Rick Rubin wanted to do is to get Metallica to sound really live in the studio. Some of the previous records we made in the '90s, I think, got a little over-laboured, got a little too anal and detail-oriented. Rick wanted to preserve that wall of sound that happens when we play live, and I'm 100 percent sure that it's retained all that liveliness, that it's loud and in your face. My friends who've heard the album all like it, so I'll take that as a good thing!

James Hetfield: 'Death Magnetic' feels really good. It's old-school essence with new sonics. And it's the most band-like I can remember us being. We've gone through lots of growing up after 'St. Anger' — as much as we can say we're grown-up! I think the main part is realising friction is a part of it all. And we need each other more than we hate each other, simple as that!

Kirk Hammett: When we started writing songs for 'Death Magnetic' we were a band again because we'd gotten Rob. That was tremendous. We started playing like a band again, started sounding like a band, started creating like a band, and that was an obvious step up from our starting place last time with 'St. Anger'. I'm really proud of this album. It's too early to tell how it fits into the overall picture, but I really believe that this album is one of our finer moments.

Robert Trujillo: This being my first Metallica album, I feel like it's great. The creative environment can be a bit intimidating because it's so intense. With Lars and James, it's like going to the best school of songwriting. But they were really open to suggestion and they wanted to hear what I had to say.

Was it a conscious decision for Metallica to reconnect with their past on 'Death Magnetic'?

James: People have said it's 'Master Of Puppets II'. That turns me off… and scares me a little bit. 'Death Magnetic' is Rick Rubin and us trying to capture the essence, the hunger, the simplicity, the skeleton of Metallica. And that's what I think we captured. It really is very clear and obvious to me, and hopefully I can make this clear to the fans, that we write these songs for ourselves. You can't please everyone. There's always going to be someone who feels victimised by the way you've done something, and I totally get that. There are lots of bands I can't listen to after a certain album, and so be it. It's perfectly normal. But we are explorers, we have to move forward and keep going, we're artists, we're hungry for the best. The best has not been achieved yet, so on we go.

Kirk: One of the main concepts that Rick Rubin brought to the table when we were initially talking to him was that he knew, in his head, what the ultimate Metallica album should sound like. He said to us: 'Whatever you guys were doing, whatever you were thinking, what you were listening to, what you were eating, drinking… try to put your minds in that spot. Because whatever you guys were doing in the early '80s, mid '80s, you guys turned out some incredible music back then.' We listened to that and agreed. The attitude we had back then was a lot different to the attitude we have now. We were young, eager to prove ourselves — eager to prove that we were one of the heaviest bands around — and we wrote accordingly. So Rick said: 'Just put yourselves in that spot.' And it totally worked. It worked across the board: in the writing, the lyrics, the guitar solos, the attitude. I remember when it came time to put down guitar solos, I listened to all the stuff that I used to listen to as a teenager: a lot of UFO, Deep Purple and Rainbow, Van Halen's first album, Pat Travers. Initially I was shocked, because I found myself being re-inspired by all this stuff that influenced me back in the day, and it opened up my playing all over again. When I applied that attitude and brought that inspiration to the new songs I got some incredible results right off the bat. The self-referencing was working, and we weren't just copying ourselves. I really felt that we were going somewhere fresh and new.

Lars: Reconnecting with the past was something that definitely happened organically. Rick spends a lot of time just hanging out and talking about music, and during the first few months, he made us comfortable about revisiting and being inspired by some of the records that we put out in the '80s: 'Ride The Lightning', 'Master Of Puppets', '…And Justice For All'. When we finished 'Justice', we felt there was nothing more to do on that progressive, thrashy side of Metallica, so we spent the better part of the '90s running as far away from those records as we could. Rick made us feel okay about revisiting those records. We started the creative process for 'Death Magnetic' in the summer of 2006, which was when the 'Master Of Puppets' 20th anniversary was going down and we played that whole record live all over Europe and Asia. We got under the skin of 'Master Of Puppets' right as we started writing these new songs for 'Death Magnetic'. And that certainly made us feel comfortable about embracing some of the things that we had done in the '80s for the first time in 15 years. It’s been interesting. Rick would suggest: 'Listen to the same records that you listened to in the '80s, or try and write the same way.' It was never: 'Copy what you were doing musically.' It was: 'Put yourself in that headspace.' And it felt really good to do that, finally. We avoided going there for so long, but when we finally went back, it was like: 'Yeah, we can hang out here — we can be inspired by those records and feel good about it.'

Rob: It seems like the band, over the past ten or 15 years, has been trying to get away from the early years. And for me, coming into Metallica, I love everything that Metallica's done, but I really, really love the old-school stuff. And just the fact that the guys were open to that was a real positive thing. Rick was very clever, even in the tuning of the songs. 'Why does Metallica have everything tuned down a half step, or a whole step? Why doesn’t Metallica tune the way they did on 'Master Of Puppets'?' And so we ended up trying the songs in natural tune, and that's great — James can still sing his ass off, and there's a bit more angst to the vocal. I really like what James did. A lot of positive things came from Rick.

Was Death Magnetic an easy album to make, especially after the difficult birth of 'St. Anger'?

James: Making this record was certainly easier than 'St. Anger'. 'St. Anger' was a purging. It boiled to a point where one of the members couldn't hang anymore. And the three of us kinda joined together after that. When a fellow brother, soldier, whatever, leaves or falls, the others rally together. It was a great thing finding Rob. The dynamic of the band is quite different now. Lars and I fight over the steering wheel, and the other two guys are perfectly fine sitting in the back seat — and that is their pretty difficult contribution, at least in my mind. I could never sit back there and be okay with it. It works real good. So the making of this record was really so much more positive and productive, we were all really thinking the same way, we weren't stepping in each other’s way just for the sake of making it known that 'I'm here!' We were going for the same cause and mission.

Lars: We wrote for the better part of a year. The songs were all constant works in progress. Then we’d go on the road and get re-inspired by this and that… we ended up with 25 skeletons of songs and then started weeding them out and ended up with 14 that we recorded. We made a decision that we were gonna record and see 14 through. We did that, and it was pretty clear which songs ended up being 11, 12, 13, 14 on the list. And we remember the old days when you made records that were a whole instead of just individual songs. We wanted that sense of a complete record, so we picked the ones that did that the best. The only thing that Rick was really adamant about was that he did not want us to go into the studio until we could play these songs in our sleep, standing on our heads, backwards, upside-down, whatever. I know this sounds silly, but he didn't want the studio to be a place of creativity, he wanted the studio to be more a place of execution, where you just go in and you just f***ing bang this shit out. You do all the thinking and the tweaking in the pre-production.

Kirk: I think 'Death Magnetic' is a pretty logical step for us to take after 'St Anger'. We spent a lot of the time not really playing our instruments while we were making 'St. Anger', which was really strange, whereas on this album we actually played our instruments a lot while we were making it! We had a lot of material pre-written, and we just took it from there: we jammed on the music, started creating songs, and the album started taking shape. Then Rick Rubin came in and added his opinions and ideas on direction.

Rob: The making of 'Death Magnetic' was very organic. The songs started to blossom about five years ago, that’s when we started to develop ideas. After two years of touring, we had at least 60 hours of ideas. We had to read through that for a year. And the writing process was created through jamming. We built up about 25 songs, narrowed that down to 14, and then to 10 for the album. The pure fact that it was created through jamming was very organic. And Rick also wanted to capture a live feel from the band, so when we were actually recording the songs we were all standing up, like it was a performance. When I was tracking bass or re-tracking something, I would stand up and headbang or get on my knees or whatever, so there’s a lot of that feel.

Is Metallica a stronger band after making 'St. Anger' and the documentary 'Some Kind Of Monster'?

Kirk: They were very cathartic and intense experiences. 'St. Anger' and 'Some Kind Of Monster' forced us to re-evaluate everything, forced us to work on our relationships with each other, our musical relationships and personal relationships: to re-evaluate why we’re even doing this. I think it was really important for us to get that perspective. We could easily have faded off into the Where Are They Now? Files. But we chose not to do that. And having gone through that whole experience, I like to think that we’ve matured a lot more now. We’re a lot more responsible to each other and to the music. And I really feel that we’ve moved on and got it all out of our system, to a point where we were able to bring in a new band member and make him feel that he wasn’t joining a band full of loonies! That was really important. And now that Rob is in the band, he interjects so much fresh enthusiasm and positivity and energy into the whole experience, it’s just a great thing. It brings us together and makes us feel like a much stronger unit nowadays, much stronger than we had felt in the last ten years.

Lars: I think Metallica is a stronger band because of 'St. Anger' and because of 'Some Kind Of Monster', even though I look at those things as very isolated experiences and experiments. We had to go through them and I’m glad we did. After Jason Newsted leaving, and James going through his whole thing, we regrouped. We couldn’t go back to making records the way we’d made them in the '90s, because we would just fall right back into the same traps. So 'St. Anger' had to be. And I’m proud of the fact that we saw it through. I understand that it’s a difficult record. It’s not a record that everybody has embraced. And that’s okay. But it had to be, in order for 'Death Magnetic' to be the way it is. 'Some Kind Of Monster', the movie, is something I’m fiercely proud of and very protective over. I’ve always felt that Metallica has done its best to welcome people in, for our fans and friends to have as much access to Metallica as possible. And obviously that movie is the ultimate in that access, whether you want it or not — here it is, in all its glory and all its ugliness! And there were a few people that maybe felt there was a little too much access, but if you open the door, open the f***ing door and let people in. To me, that just goes back to our punk roots. That’s just about trying to connect with people as much as possible. Obviously things are very, very different in this band in 2008 than they were in 2001 and 2002, when both of those projects were going down, and I’ve spent an awful lot of time in the last couple of months trying to make sure people understand that it’s not quite like that anymore. Everybody plays nicely in the sandbox and everybody sort of gets along. It’s all very civil, cordial… pleasant, even! There’s a word: pleasant! The word ‘fun’ comes to mind, goddammit! It’s fun to be in Metallica! It’s been a great couple of years. I think we finally got all the balances figured out between our own needs, the band’s needs, family needs, the whole thing. It’s balanced. And the fact that the Metallica baby factory spits out babies one a year at the moment, it gives everybody in the band — a bunch of guys that don’t have a lot in common to begin with — something more to talk about! It’s all good. 'St. Anger' and 'Some Kind Of Monster', those are distant memories, really.

James: I turned 45 on 3 August, and so far the 40s have been the best decade yet, I’d say. Maybe it’s a little bit wisdom sinking through this thick head. But I’m starting to figure out the dynamic of the band, acknowledging what we have and why it works. Realizing that we need each other. When we go places together, we’re able to achieve great things with the Metallica key. Otherwise we’d be four so-so musicians, I’d say. Except Rob.

Rob: With 'Some Kind Of Monster', I first heard about the film crew being on hand when I was about 20 minutes from the band headquarters. I’d flown in from Los Angeles and I received a phone call that said: ‘There will be a film crew there documenting, are you OK with that?’ What am I gonna say? It’s going down! And I had spent the previous year running away from the cameras in the world of Ozzy Osbourne. So here I am, and I’m not running away from anybody this time. So I was like, oaky, I can handle this. It was a little bit strange at first. But at the end of the day, when I see the footage from 'Some Kind Of Monster' and I see myself performing the songs for the first time with them, I feel some joy in there, but I also feel some pain, because Lars took me out for a few drinks after the first day. It was more of a fly on the wall day where I was kinda hanging out, but later on that night it was like: ‘Hey, let’s go for a few drinks!’ I think he was testing me. I think the Viking in Lars wanted to see how the new guy can handle himself on a night out with Lars Ulrich from Metallica. Can you handle this? I did a pretty good job — but when I see that footage? Painful.

During the creation of 'Death Magnetic', Metallica have taken time out of the studio to play three summer tours. Why?

Kirk: The reason why we did all those summer tours to get out of the studio is because you can really get stuck in studio mode. It’s really easy to lose touch with what that live energy is all about. You lose touch with that feeling of playing music in front of an audience. We thought is was essential for us to continue to go out and play shows so as to keep grounded in that live performance format. Also it was a good way to get out of the studio so that we didn’t feel like we were doing too much of one thing. A good chance of pace. It was good to readjust our whole perspective. You can lose touch with that essence of live performance if you stay in the studio too long. It’s really easy to get caught up in a lot of the production things when you’re recording a song. You can put it in five or six guitar overdubs here and then we can dub in a symphony here and all this percussion stuff here, and then when you go to play the song live, you’re basically playing the skeleton of the recording. It’s very easy to fall into that groove of building a song in the studio so that it turns into this audio collage of sounds, but when you take it out of the studio and play it live, all you have is two guitars, bass and drums — and a lot of times, the song suffers. These songs, they’re put together to be played by two guitars, bass and drums live, and it’s great that we’re back to that again, because what you hear on record is going to be much closer to what you’re hearing live.

Lars: Being fortunate enough to travel around the world and play to an average of 50,000 people a night, I hear myself say: ‘If you ever hear me complain, slap me!’ It’s an unbelievable thing. I’m just amazed that people show up! Metal all over the world is alive and well and probably doing better than it has for a long time. It feels like a real vital energy at the moment, and it seems that a lot of the younger kids that are coming up are bypassing most things grunge and bypassing most things rap-metal, and most of the 13 year-olds now are into all the same things that we were into the ‘70s and ‘80s, thanks in part to Guitar Hero and Rock Band and so on. It’s very healthy, metal on a worldwide basis, and we really feel it. I mean, we’ve been around longer than God’s dog, but I try not to use the word ‘work’. And I try to discourage other people around us from using it. That’s an insult to people that really work. The closest we get to work, that’s when we’re at home, taking care of our families, getting up at 6.30am and making lunchboxes and driving kids to school, all that domestic suburban stuff. When I’m on the road, it’s fun! When I’m on the road, I sleep more than I do at home! On the road, I got my friends, I sit around and have a couple of glasses of wine and play some rock ‘n’ roll and meet some nice people. That’s fun. The work part’s at home. We’ve found much better balances now. We tour in shorter spurts, but we tour more often. This thing that we joke about, the last couple of years, our summer vacation tours, it’s great. We play a few a shows in Europe… what would you rather do? I can’t think of anything.

The band will be back on tour in 2009. Are you excited about bringing some of the new 'Death Magnetic' songs into the live set?

Lars: Absolutely! We started playing 'Cyanide' and 'The Day That Never Comes' in Europe. We’re gonna rehearse all ten songs from the album. We wanna be able to play all ten of them at any given time. These songs feel a lot more effortless. Some of the 'St. Anger' stuff was pretty f***ing difficult to play! A lot of 'St. Anger' was created in the ProTools computer, which explains it a little bit. But these new songs are very effortless to play, it’s fun, it feels a lot more natural and organic. Some of the 'St. Anger' stuff was a bit of a challenge to connect with the fans live. But these new songs… we can’t wait! There’s 75 minutes’ worth of music on the album. We change the set list every night, so we’ll play different new songs, throw as much different stuff in there. We’ll play three new songs one night and three or four different ones the next night. Playing 'Cyanide' is fun, and we’re itching to play the other songs.

James: When I’m writing in the studio, I can’t help but think, This chorus will sound great with 10, 20, 30 000 people — depends on who shows up! It’ll sound great with ten people in a club! I get that sense… I’ve kinda been doing this a while! I can feel what parts people are gonna latch on to. It is pretty universal. When there’s a part to be sung, you kinda feel it. So when we’re writing, I do like to concentrate on… this is a bouncy part, this is very easy to understand, this is very sing-able — but without making it corny anthem-y, where everyone and their brother’s is gonna be singing all the time everywhere. 'Death Magnetic' is a mixture of a lot of different tastes of Metallica, and hopefully there are a few songs in there that will become live evergreens. We’ve been touring for a few hundred years and forced a lot of songs into people’s faces, and they’ve learned them, and that’s how you get that song that stays in the live set. We saw it even in the …And 'Justice For All' length of songs. I’d rather have shorter songs that are meatier. 'St. Anger' had a lot of long songs that did not translate well live. We are destined to push this live. We want to keep relevant and keep going, because that’s what keeps us alive.

Kirk: I can’t wait to get back on tour and start playing these new songs. We thought we should try to play at least four or five new songs every night. I feel that every single song on this album will make an incredible live song, because they’re all written with live performance in mind, which is something we did back in the ‘80s. So it’s going to be pretty fun to interject these new tunes into the set, because we’ve been going off on tour every summer for the last three years and we haven’t had an album, so it’ll be nice to out some fresh new songs into the set and really change it up.

On tour, Metallica always arrange special meet-and-greet sessions with fans before every show. Why is this so important to you?

James: The meet-and-greets are such a great vibe, they’re such a great inspiration for both sides, I think. I feel I’m getting more out of it than the fans are, a lot of times. When there’s not too many, when you’ve got a manageable amount of people, you can actually spend some time with them and make it real. We love the meet-and-greets! They inspire us. I love to hear the feedback, good and bad. When you go into a meet-and-greet, you’re feeling pretty confident. Everyone’s looking at you, you’re going, ‘Yeah, I’m the man, I feel pretty good, you can say anything you want to me and it’s not gonna hurt.’ Someone will say: ''Kill ‘Em All' is the best — you guys suck after that record!’ ‘Okay! That’s great — but what is it you thinks sucks?’ You know, start to converse about it, maybe they didn’t think about it, ha ha ha! You meet some kooks, too. It’s pretty funny, you get some people that just have me rolling. It puts you in a good mood, man.

Lars: Meet-and-greets, they’re usually the first highlight of the day. It doesn’t matter what kind of day you’re having or what the f**k is going on, when you’re out there for half an hour meeting people who’ve travelled from all over the world and who are sharing their stories and sharing their love for all things Metallica, it’s just the greatest. We were down in Istanbul this summer, and there were kids that had come from all over the Middle East, Iran and Iraq and Lebanon, it was just crazy. Just standing there and hearing their stories, it was unbelievable. It’s always the highlight of the day, that’s when the day kicks in, it’s something I treasure a lot. When I look back over the last 25 years, what I’m proudest of is the relationship with the fans. I think we run as clean of a ship as you can. We’ve always tried to make the fans feel that they’re part of a ride and that there are as few obstacles between us and them as possible. I think Metallica exists in its own little universe that’s pretty independent of what goes on in other music genres and waves and fashions and all this crap. The Metallica fans, we do what we can to connect with them. I think the website that we have, we do it about as well as anybody, and we can part ourselves on the back here. I’m proud of that. The fans have stood by us in difficult times, but now it’s better than it’s ever been, on all levels.

Rob: The welcome I’ve had from the fans has been great. In the beginning I really tuned out because I had so much on my plate. I had to learn over 23 years of catalogue, had to learn the St. Anger music, which was very difficult. So my head was spinning, it was like a whirlwind. And of course, when you’re coming into a band like Metallica, you’re gonna have the fans and their comments and how they feel — you really have to prove to them that you’re worthy. So I really didn’t kinda tune in to the exterior much. I was the boy in the bubble. I just felt more like I needed to focus on the music and taking it to the stage, doing what I know how to do, trying to give 100 percent. That’s what I’ve always tried to do in Metallica, give it my all. Everything in Metallica happens very quickly. When I officially joined the band, they called me one evening and said: ‘Hey, can you come up to the headquarters?’ I had to stop everything and move for these guys. I flew up the next morning, but with the notion that maybe I wouldn’t be getting the gig. Like, ‘Hey man, you came close, but we wanted to tell you in person that we’re not going with you.’ Anyway, it was quite the opposite. It was a great moment, a bit like being wiped out by a huge wave. Not getting hurt or anything — just this massive whirlwind of white water throwing me around. A lot of excitement.

The first single from 'Death Magnetic' is 'The Day That Never Comes'. The video for the song is essentially a short film with a war theme, directed by Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg. What is the concept behind this film?

Lars: 'The Day That Never Comes', the first featured video — we’re actually trying to condition ourselves to use the phrase ‘short film’. I was on a treadmill in Italy in July and I spent about an hour in the company of one of those cheesy music video channels, and literally I was close to puking. I called our manager Cliff Burnstein and I said: 'We can’t make videos, we have to get away from that. We have to make short films.' Of course, when all the songs are north of eight minutes they almost by default become short films. But we basically made the decision to work with film directors. We made a very short list of some our favourite directors, people we thought were edgy, the vital young film directors of our time. That’s our plan: three or four short films. Thomas Vinterberg, a fellow Dane, somebody I’ve been enamoured with for ten years and have known for a long time, he just came up with this great concept for 'The Day That Never Comes'. Of the ten songs on the record, this probably has the least abstract, most specific lyrics. He took the very obvious place where those lyrics were set and completely threw that away and set the song up in a very different environment. The scale of it was very big. This whole set-up on one hand is very contemporary and very relevant in what it’s saying, but it’s also completely timeless: it really is a story about forgiveness, it’s a story about redemption, it’s a story about human interaction, it’s a story about people being in a situation they don’t want to be in. I’m really, really proud of this video. I think that it fits the song beautifully. I really want people to interpret it for themselves, but I think it has one foot in relevance and one foot in timelessness, and in some way it has the same vitality that the video for 'One' did.

James: The short film appealed to me. I’m tired of seeing the same old kind of video. We wanted to try something different. Obviously we’d done certain short film types with 'The Unforgiven' things. We’d done the One video, which I wanted this to remind me of. Obviously there’s a war theme. But the movie behind 'One', that’s an older movie, so it wasn’t like we were hooked up with the new 'Batman' movie or something. This is supposed to enhance our music. I really love the fact that it’s not literal. It’s not dumb! It’s emotional, even without the music.

You had various titles for the album before you chose 'Death Magnetic'. What was your favourite working title?

James: We had a whole wall of possible titles that obviously turned into the joke wall. I think one of the titles was 'Van Halen 11'. It didn’t make much sense! Rick Rubin was on this organic kick. Everything was organic. 'Turn the computer off, it’s not organic!' So we played along with that and we found a little organic stickers and put them all over the desktop. And we came up with album titles around that. One was War-ganic!

Lars: 'Suicide & Redemption' is the album’s instrumental track, and the title, we were toying with that as the title for the record, because all of the songs had that dark and abstract feel. That was the first album title I liked. It certainly fits the song. As we were sorting through the riffs and putting ideas together, the idea of doing an old-school Metallica instrumental track came up. It has that kind of epic hugeness to it.

Finally, a last word on 'Death Magnetic'?

James: We try to concentrate on what we think it right and what’s best for us, and whatever radiates form there we have no control over. We’re not worried too much about the outside pressure. The pressure from within is always the greatest — from us, being perfectionists, wanting to be better, wanting to be the first at things, wanting to shine brighter. The will to be better — that’s what keeps Metallica going.


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