METALLICA's HETFIELD On 'Chinese Democracy': 'I Haven't Lost Sleep Waiting For It'

Andrew Dansby of the Houston Chronicle recently conducted an interview with METALLICA guitarist/vocalist James Hetfield. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Houston Chronicle: Do you feel sobriety changed the way you write?

Hetfield: I can say I've taken off the black-cloud glasses. It's pretty amazing and continues to be. I'm not here to preach about it, to say it's got to be this way for everyone. But it feels like things happened where I didn't get the full effect, and now I do. Better late than never.

Houston Chronicle: Yet you have a death-filled album titled "Death Magnetic" . . .

Hetfield: Well, you can't turn that off. (Laughs.) We stick to pretty core stuff. When I try to tell a story tell or explain history or something it always comes out wrong. When I can get dark and universal with it, it's a little more real. But we've heard a lot of things like, "I caught you smiling. How're you going to write songs?" It happens, man. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life trying to sort out the first half of it. It's a work in progress.

Houston Chronicle: "St. Anger" gets beaten to death in print, even by you guys. Is it safe to say you don't love your albums equally?

Hetfield: I would love to love them all equally. They all have their own heart and history. I love the "Death Magnetic" record. And I guess you're kind of trained to bad-mouth the record before. "St. Anger" was a statement. It was more a statement than a collection of songs.

Houston Chronicle: More than any other it seemed to have the least distance between singer and narrator.

Hetfield: It sounds fragmented and angry, which is how we were. I still think it'll have its time. Certain albums they rise and fall. There are so many records that I listen to now that I didn't as kid; I thought were crap. I listen now and go, "That's a really good album."

Houston Chronicle: You guys have an uneasy history with GUNS N' ROSES. Have you heard Axl Rose's new record? Do you even care?

Hetfield: I'll certainly listen to it. But I haven't lost sleep waiting for it. I thought we took a long time to make an album. But you know he's late for everything so it makes total sense. We saw him play at a festival in Germany two years ago. He's a good frontman. He's eccentric, but all artists are. If they don't show that they're quirky, they're lying to you. They're either pretending they're not or they're pretending they're an artist.

Read the entire interview from Houston Chronicle.