Found by Kelly on MetBB
WHAT IS THE NEW ALBUM SOUNDING LIKE?
Kirk Hammett - In comparison with St Anger, this album is a lot more riffy, a lot more dynamic,a lot more tighter in the arrangement and a lot more to the point. It's more traditional Metallica. And there are a lot more guitar solo's on it, i have to say. One song cycles through so many changes, it feels like I'm soloing for a full minute.
WHY DID YOU SELECT RICK RUBIN TO PRODUCE IT?
Kirk Hammett - We knew that we needed to go down a different avenue. And it seemed like whenever i mentioned to people that we'd started writing another album, they'd say,"you gotta get Rick Rubin." And we'd been considering that ourselves anyway. We've known Rick since 1986 when Reign In Blood came out. I remember Rick showing up backstage at a Master Of Puppets show. And he had the master tape to Reign In Blood. And we were thinking "Oh wow, he has the new Slayer album. We gotta hear it." And i remember once we heard it we were just like,"Holy crap, that's the best thing we've heard."
WHY DID YOU DECIDE NOT TO USE BOB ROCK?
Kirk Hammett - We've been with Bob Rock a good 16 years or so. It kind of culminated with him playing bass in the band for St Anger. I love the contributions Bob has given the band. I really felt like he was in the band at the end, But it was time to move on. We really owe a lot to Bob for helping us achieve the goals we wanted to achieve in the 90s which were drastically different from what we wanted to achieve in the 80s. Bob was the guy to do that, while still maintaining musical integrity, But now its a whole new decade and time for a change. We had all the usual conversations," Who are we going to get to produce? Should we do it ourselves again? Should we get the producer du jour'?" And since Rick's name was coming up every 15 minutes, we were open to giving him a try.
HOW HAS IT BEEN DIFFERENT WORKING WITH RICK RUBIN?
Kirk Hammett - "Bob Rock had a certain amount of musical input into the songs. He'd say, " Alright,D sharp instead of F sharp," or " Play a major pentatonic there rather than a minor pentatonic," I think that's great. We were into that. Maybe we needed it at that point, But Rick Rubin doesn't get into the technical aspect of things: sounds, or is this the right scale or right key? He mainly goes by feel. How we're relating to each other and to the song. How we're playing. The feel we're projecting to each other and to the song. And basically he lets us know if were on or not. He lets us know if a riff is not happening. If its happening,great. If not, he just tells us to write something better. I really like that approach because the responsibility of it all is in our hands. Rick is letting us steer this thing ourselves. He's not in the studio while we are recording, so there isn't that typical Record Producer micro-management going on 24/7. Because that's what producers do, right? Micro-manage every detail. They're into that. When we were cutting drums, he was there in the studio for us. Because his main concern is how the drums feel and how the vocals feel. But when we were there recording he was very laid back, literally. He was on the couch. He has great suggestions and idea's. A lot of times they're out of our range of thinking. But thats due to the fact that he's a non-musician who's very musical. He has a sense musicality that's more on the listener's side of things, rather than the performer's side of things. It's obviously working for him. It's obviously a universial thing,he gets results.
HOW ARE YOU WRITING THE SONGS?
Kirk Hammett - We used an approach that was the sane as St Anger, in the sense that we'd all show up and jam on songs. The seeds of the songs on this new album came out of jams that we would have on the road, before we would go on stage. We have this thing called the tuning room at our shows. It's usually a really small room with a drum kit, 2 guitar amps, a bass amp, a P.A that's never loud enough and a pro tools set up. One of us would come in with a riff and we'd jam on it. James was always the 1st one in the tuning room, so often he would be fiddling with a riff and the rest of us came in. And we would do this everytime we had a show. So at the end of the tour we had of 50 hours of music,it was insane. We went through all of it, trying to narrow it down, which was a horrible process for me, because i think everything we play is great. So i wasn't any help! I let all the other guys pick the riffs. Once all the major riffs were picked,we started jamming on them and turning them into songs. After about a years time ,we had 22 songs. We just refined it from there.
AT WHAT POINT DID RICK RUBIN ENTER THE PROCESS?
Kirk Hammett - "Right around the point where we had 22 songs. We had a lot of meetings with him. He listened to the songs we had written up to then and he liked what he heard. He said "Yeah, keep working on those songs, keep making them better'" Eventually we had a vote on the 14 strongest songs. From there, we pretty much focused on those songs and worked on them with Rick.
WHAT ARE THE LYRICS LIKE?
Kirk Hammett - I think James is handling the lions share of that this time. A lot of times i try to contribute song titles because that might spare idea's. But at this point we still just have stupid working titles for the songs. With us, there's never any shortage of idea's, which is the problem. There are already too many titles. But i'm afraid the list is not for public consumption . It ranges from the really great to the really stupid.
