Kirk Hammett is Already Writing Material for the Next Metallica Album
After infamously losing a cell phone on which he’d recorded some 250 riff ideas, Kirk Hammett contributed very little to the writing of Metallica’s most recent album, Hardwired… to Self-Destruct. Hammett was quite bummed about the whole thing, stating at the time:
“For me, being in this band, I always want to contribute. I always have a lot of musical concepts and ideas to bring to the table. Obviously, that was not meant to be this time, and I had to accept that fact.
“So I focused on my solos, just making sure that my playing on the album was at its best – at its full potential. Hopefully I can bring my ideas to the next Metallica album. I just hope it’s not another eight years.”
James Hetfield later revealed that Hammett was “not present in the studio” because he was “dealing with life” and “had a lot of life things going on for himself,” which surely could’ve been a factor in his lack of contributions as well. The extent to which that life shit and/or the lost cell phone were the cause of his creative absence from Hardwired we will likely never know.
Regardless, with the sour taste of his lack of input on Hardwired still not fully worn off, Hammett is now doing everything in his power to speed up the Metallica recording timeline by actively hacking away in the riff shop. Speaking recently with Mixdown Magazine, he stated:
“When I was 13-14 years old, bands put out albums every year. Seriously, KISS put out an album every eight months. None of this eight-years-between-albums. None of us are very comfortable with the fact it’s been so long – because that is a long time. We’re hoping to avoid that this time around. We’re in our third year since Hardwired. Maybe we can get a bit more focus and go into the studio a bit sooner. I have a ton of material. I’ve over-compensated, so I’m ready to go anytime.”
The moral of the story for Kirk here is, of course, back up your shit! Back it up somewhere, then back it up again on a separate drive. Then upload it to the cloud, too (password protected, natch — we don’t want to be reading about how some young internet sleuth stole all of Kirk Hammett’s riffs a year from now… although, actually, that’d be pretty funny).
[via Ultimate Guitar]
