METALLICA's KIRK HAMMETT: 'We Will Always Be Creative, Because That's How We Are As Individuals'

Luis Fernando Orquera of Ecuador's El Comercio conducted an interview with METALLICA guitarist Kirk Hammett on March 18 in Quito. You can now listen to the chat using the SoundCloud widget below.

Asked if he can ever see the day when METALLICA will just tour and will no longer make new music, Hammett said: "I hope not. There's a lot of different aspects to this band that we need to tend to. But I really think that the touring part supports the recording part, and the recording part — the creativity, the songs — supports the touring part. Both of those things kind of support each other and need each other for us to move forward. So I think that we would always need to write music, write songs, record them… It might be the exact opposite — we might just end up recording songs for the rest of our career at one point. Or we might end up just touring. But I, myself, doubt that any of those two things will happen. I'm pretty confident that we will always be creative, because that's how we are as individuals. I mean, that's how I am — I get bored, pick up my guitar, and next thing you know, I have a fucking riff. I get excited and I show it to the other guys, and next thing you know, we're jamming on it. It's a part of what we do."

METALLICA just completed a South American tour where the band played a nearly all-request set, with 17 songs chosen online by fans prior to each gig and the last slot filled by the new track "Lords Of Summer".

Drummer Lars Ulrich told Rolling Stone that "Lords Of Summer" "is fairly representative of where our creative headspace is at right now. It's one of those things that's like, 'Here, we're writing and we're creating.'"

Hammett told The Pulse Of Radio that coming up with music is not a problem for the band. "We're a band that never has a shortage of ideas," he said. "You know, you hear about these bands that are like, oh, they're sitting in the studio and they don't have any songs, what are they gonna do? That's not METALLICA. METALLICA's problem is the total opposite: we have too many ideas, which ones are we gonna use. And so that's pretty much how it stands with us."

Ulrich cautioned, however, that "Lords Of Summer" may not even end up on METALLICA's next album at all, or at least not in its current form. He explained, "We did the same thing when we went out and played a bunch of dates in 2006. We were writing and played two different new songs over the course of that summer, and none of them made the record (2008's 'Death Magnetic')."

The Metallica By Request tour will hit Europe this summer, with a single North American date confirmed in Montreal, as the band continues working on its 10th studio album.