JASON NEWSTED Talks To Comedian JIM FLORENTINE (Audio)

Comedian and metalhead Jim Florentine of VH1 Classic's "That Metal Show" recently conducted an interview with former METALLICA, VOIVOD and FLOTSAM AND JETSAM bassist and current NEWSTED frontman Jason Newsted for Jim's weekly podcast. You can now listen to the chat using the audio player below.

NEWSTED's debut album, "Heavy Metal Music", sold nearly 8,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release to land at position No. 40 on The Billboard 200 chart. The CD was made available on August 6 in North America via Chophouse Records/Collective Sounds and August 5 in Europe through Spinefarm Records. Jason told Billboard.com the 11-song album was very similar to the band's debut EP, "Metal", which opened with around 6,200 units to debut at No. 62. "The EP was always intended to be the primer, a sampler of what was to come on the LP," he said. "It's all metal all the time. It's not all fast, but it is all heavy."

Regarding how the material for NEWSTED's debut album came together, Jason told Loudwire: "It started out as my seeds for the first eleven songs that I made on my GarageBand thing. I wrote all the tracks — guitars, bass, drums, everything and gave them to Jessie [Farnsworth, guitar] and Jesus [Mendez Jr., drums] and had them go learn it, put their artistry on it and so it was collaborative in that way for the first batch. Like the four songs on the EP came from that initial eleven, so that's how those songs went. Each day as we get deeper into the songs, the collaboration gets deeper as well. I have come a long way from my tunnel vision of 'Only my ideas are good enough' bullshit, and I'm a lot more open to everyone's ideas and the artistry of each person to make it what it is. And three heads is better than one and that kind of thing. So it has become more collaborative as we go. I've written ten more since that time in October last year and a few of them have made their way onto this LP now. Once again, they were all my seeds, but now that we have Mike Mushok in the band and I give the music to all three of those guys, now I have three great artists bringing back their responses and their counterpoint playing to my ideas, so it's becoming more and more collaborative every day and on this LP there will be shared writing credits on at least half of the songs with the writing credits now."

NEWSTED took part in this year's edition of Gigantour, the critically acclaimed package festival founded in 2005 by MEGADETH mainman Dave Mustaine. Also appearing on the bill were headliners MEGADETH, along with BLACK LABEL SOCIETY, DEVICE, HELLYEAH and DEATH DIVISION.

Interview (audio):