Recently, Metallica released their album “72 Seasons,” and suffice it to say that they had no trouble coming up with riffs to fill it up. Bass Player was informed by Robert Trujillo that having too many excellent ideas may be both a benefit and a burden. He stated:
“One of the beautiful things about being in Metallica is that there’s no shortage of great ideas. Our blessing is also a curse. We have more riffs than we know what to do with. With every handful of riffs, we get out of Kirk, there are another 500 we didn’t hear. I might have ten spare ideas for every one I put forward, things that don’t even get listened to. So I have this arsenal of bass lines and riffs that I sit on.”
They can’t access some of the options since there are too many to pick from. The bassist, on the other hand, was certain that the bass line for “Suicide & Redemption” would be kept, as he recalled:
“And it’s not that nobody wanted to listen to them – we just had enough. There comes a point where you don’t need any more. All of these songs have a lot of cool ideas in them. ‘Suicide & Redemption’ from ‘Death Magnetic,’ for instance, was a bass line I had for a long time, and I always had Metallica’s name written on that thing.”
The band members previously mentioned that they had too many riffs and ideas to choose from while discussing their follow-up to 2008’s “Death Magnetic” album. Rob and James Hetfield discussed their riff stack’s overflow in an interview with Rolling Stone.
“I only have 846 riffs. In iTunes, you can see how many things you’ve got. And that does not include the soundchecks, the stuff we goof around with.”
The bassist added, “[James] Hetfield — he’s a writing machine. Kirk [Hammett] has over 300 ideas. There’s so much stuff from the tuning-room jams, from all those years of touring.”
The interview can be read here.
