METALLICA's LARS ULRICH On Creative Process: 'You Have To Be Prepared To Go Wherever It Takes You'

July 13, 2017

Dickerman and LT of the WJRR radio station conducted an interview with METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich before the band's July 5 concert at Camping World Stadium in Orlando, Florida. You can now listen to the chat below.

Speaking about the reasons for the overwhelmingly positive response to METALLICA's latest album, "Hardwired… To Self-Destruct", Ulrich said: "I would say that, sitting, talking about it afterwards, most of it is… It's like the luck of the dice. We never sit down to try to have a [discussion about], 'The record's gotta be this way, and it's gotta sound like this and it's gonna have this kind of reaction.' I mean, there's never that kind of a mission statement, because you've gotta… Any kind of creative endeavor, any kind of a creative journey, there has to be a degree of flexibility, because if the creative elements have to be authentic and pure and not contrived and not overly thought out, you have to be prepared to go wherever it takes you. And so almost all the time with records and creative... whether it's some of the movies we've done or the videos we make, or whatever we do, it just sort of has a life of its own."

He continued: "I think a significant reason for this record's being received the way… and maybe people don't intellectualize it and overanalyze it, but James [Hetfield, METALLICA frontman] and I were talking about it an hour ago when we were sitting back there eating lunch, is Greg Fidelman, who engineered this record, who co-produced it with James and I, who was responsible for all the sonics and the mixing and all that. He's been with METALLICA now for over ten years. He knows us, and he knows how to make us sound the way we should sound and maximize kind of our thing. And I think that he's a significant reason for all the goodwill that's coming back our way in the last six months since this record came out."

METALLICA has just resumed its first North American tour in more than seven years.

"Hardwired... To Self-Destruct" came out last November, eight years after "Death Magnetic".

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