METALLICA To Begin Recording In March

METALLICA has issued the following update:

"Greetings from not-so-sunny Northern California. We know that things have been pretty quiet here in web-land, so we thought we'd throw some shit your way... here goes...

"We are finishing up the last couple weeks of pre-production on the album and... really... seriously...(drum roll)... we're going to start recording on March 12th. We're pretty fuckin' psyched about it and pretty fuckin' psyched to be sharing this experience with Rick [Rubin, producer].

"But wait... there's more. We kinda sorta figured that by the time June rolled around, we would be ready for a break from recording (escape??) and since we had so much fun in Europe last summer, we thought, 'Why not go back for some more fun and games?' We're planning to share the summer love with our friends in some different countries we didn't get to last year... Okay, fuck it, maybe one or two repeats. We haven't quite worked out all the details yet, but we thought that for once we really would be the first site to break a piece of METALLICA news.

"So keep your eyes open for more details in the next few.. the plan right now is to head out in late June and hang out for a couple/three weeks. We might even do a certain festival that we've played 19 times in July that starts with a 'W,' maybe hit a certain band member's home turf... blah, blah, blah.

"It's a start . . . ."

Check out pictures from the studio at Metallica.com.

METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich recently spoke to Revolver magazine (web site) about the writing process for the group's new album, tentatively due before the end of the year via Warner Bros. Records. "It's nice not to walk into the studio and all of sudden there's three cameras in your face and you have to sit down and talk for four hours about how you were feeling last night," he said, referring to the film crew that documented every detail of METALLICA's meltdown during the recording of 2003's "St. Anger". We're kind of past that phase. Everybody gets along now. These days, it's fun going down to the studio — it's actually something I look forward to instead of dreading it. And I think that's a reflection of how far we've come."

The band has roughly 25 new songs, a large pool Ulrich credits to jamming in the tuning room every night before they went onstage on the "St. Anger" tour. They're intent on whittling the final tracklist down to 12 or 14 tunes.

"The amount of material is a little overwhelming," Ulrich admitted, "so we're trying to be as self-critical as possible. It's great with Rick, because he doesn't really have any baggage with us. He just comes in and says, 'That's great. That's not so great.' I think after 15 years with Bob [Rock], it was just time to kind of reinvent the wheel. I think what happened with Bob was it got to the point where we just knew each other too well. And we needed a different dynamic."

Revolver's entire interview with Lars Ulrich can be found in the magazine's March 2007 issue, available on the newsstands now. More information is available at www.revolvermag.com.

(Thanks: ironnuts22)