Interview d'Hetfield et Ulrich :
METALLICA spoke to Geoff Boucher from Latimes.com recently about a number of topics including their forthcoming album, Death Magnetic. Here is an excerpt from the story:
Since 1991, Metallica's producer had been Bob Rock. After the tumult of St. Anger and the making of the movie Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster, James Hetfield said, it was a good time to make a break. They also had brought in a new bassist, Robert Trujillo, to replace 14-year member Jason Newsted, who left in a huff right before St. Anger - yet another soap opera.
"A chapter has closed here, we've purged a lot of stuff from the past," said Hetfield, the primary lyricist for the band and its most famous face. "So after that we wanted to move on. We got a new bass player, a new attitude, and so we told Bob we were going in a new direction. We started working on songs without any producer at all, and that was new for us."
They then turned to Rubin, the guru for landmark albums by artists as disparate as SLAYER, JOHNNY CASH, RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS, and THE BEASTIE BOYS. While former producer Rock had been "the first one in the studio each morning turning on the lights and the one with the plan," Hetfield said, Rubin was a more occasional presence. "Rick Rubin didn't even have keys, he wasn't even near the building during the sessions!"
Asked a few months ago about his goals for Death Magnetic, Rubin said, simply, that he wanted the band to use their mid-1980s work as a stylistic starting point. "All of the things they have done since then end up taking the music into a new place, but this way it still holds on to the things that made those albums so powerful."
Lars Ulrich said what Rubin really brought to the table was decisiveness. "He's no mediator. There is no wobble in what he says. If me and Hetfield butt heads, he will listen and say, 'This is right, that's wrong.' One time, we played something new and he didn't like it. 'That makes me want to kill myself,' he says. Then later he hears a different version he says, 'I want to hear that 1,000 times over.' "
The title of Death Magnetic, Ulrich has said, is a reference to musicians who seemed drawn to death (among them Cliff Burton, the band's bassist who was killed in a 1986 tour-bus crash in Sweden). The song titles fit the nature of the band's music, which is relentlessly grim and at times ferocious: 'Broken, Beat & Scarred', 'Cyanide', 'Suicide & Redemption', etc. Though Metallica has pulled its music toward the commercial at certain points in the past, this album (which fulfills its contract with Warner Music Group) features epic songs with strafing guitar and artillery-like drums; one clocks in at nearly 10 minutes. It hasn't sounded this dangerous since Reagan was in office.
"I think we successfully recalled the feelings of 'Master of Puppets' but with the knowledge of now," said Hetfield, somehow using the language of therapy to describe a soundtrack to the apocalypse. "We did a lot of looking forward but we kept looking in the rearview mirror."