Metallica’s James Hetfield: ‘What people think of me is none of my business’

Thirty-freakin’-years!

After 18 albums, 37 chart-busting successful singles, nine Grammy Awards and 100 million albums sold worldwide, Metallica has finally made their way to Malaysia.

After thirty-freakin’-years!

Ask any Metallica fan and they would tell you that the wait was unbearable, but it was worth it. Because they are legends, right?

So when the lead vocalist of the band, the one-and-only James Hetfield, walked into the room for a scheduled media interview session – in flip-flops and shorts, no less – one can sense the excitement of meeting, and talking to, arguably one of the greatest rock legends of all time.

Despite his angry music and his intimidating looks, do not let his on-stage persona fool you: the 50-year-old was surprisingly very chatty and very down to earth. We talked to James about a possible retirement, what he thinks about today’s rock bands and – gasp! – a rumoured new album from Metallica.


Hi James, welcome to Malaysia. How does it feel to be playing in a new place?
It’s amazing. After 32 years of playing, it’s remarkable that we come to a new country like Malaysia, like China. We’ve never played there before, so there’s always a first, even at my ripe age of 50. (Laughs)

Being in the industry for so long, Metallica has been through thick and thin, and your fans were actually pretty upset when the band decided to mellow down, compared to your heavy metal image in the 80s. How do you guys keep up with your image today?
Hey, I’m 50. I’m not 20 anymore, you know. We went to spread chaos, we went to destroy the world and take it over. We’ve gone from that to, “Hey, we have a large family around this planet, so let’s go play for them and make people smile”. It’s different, and we’re not afraid to be honest about how we feel at this age, you know. Musically, we’re not catering to anyone except ourselves, so maybe the people that are saying we’ve toned down are young and want crazy stuff. So, listen to our early albums, or to the bands that do any of that. (Laughs)

Obviously, throughout the 30 years Metallica have been around, you guys were embroiled in countless scandals and controversies. How do you guys respond to that?
Well, we are not out for attention. What other people think of me, it’s none of my business. We are doing this for ourselves, and if you don’t enjoy it, then don’t enjoy it. It’s OK, I’m not asking you to like it, and we’re not praying that you like it. That’s not living, you know. The fans that we like to attract are the ones that are open-minded and like to experience new things in life.

Have you ever woken up one day and went, “We’re not doing this anymore”?
Maybe if we wake up too early, it’s like, “Oh, my back! We’re not doing that today”. (Laughs) But the reality is we’re getting older and people say, “Hey, the Rolling Stones are still going at a hundred years old”. I don’t know how old they are, but they are old, and I don’t know what it’s like for us. For us it’s a little more physical, so we’ll see. It might be one day we’ll wake up and say, “Dude, I can’t move”. Then, we’ll take a day off and see how it goes. Or we’ll just tour less. Or we write more songs. We don’t retire from music. It’s in you, you just keep doing it.

You’ve made a name for yourself with awesome guitar riffs. Do you have a template for coming out with these riffs, or is it based on gut feeling?
There’s quite a few different ways it happens. For me, if I’m writing, it just starts to happen. It depends on what mood I’m in, it depends on what guitar sound I have. A lot of times, the guitar sounds move me in some way that I feel it’s not me; it’s coming from something. I’m just a messenger here, things are coming through me and it’s a good feeling, you know. Or Lars (Ulrich) could just play a beat, and I’ll just come up with 20 riffs. I don’t know why, but it happens. It feels right, and it feels good. We care for that gift by continuing to write.

Playing for over three decades is a very long time. What are some of the stumbling blocks you guys faced over the years?
Most of the stumbling blocks, I think, were like internal conflict within the band. I think that’s the number one killer of most bands. You can have everything; you have a lot of fans, you have a popular album, but if you’re not happy within, it’s terrible. It’s like a marriage; it’s not easy. The more work you put into it, the more love you get out of it, so that’s the key for being in a band as well.

Bands in general have a very short life span, so how do you guys stick together for so long and continue to make good music? Is there a secret formula to it?
I tell people; you need to be honest to yourself. We need to write music that we like hearing. If you write music just to try and please other people, you can get resentful around that. Be honest to yourself, that’s what I tell younger bands. You have to write songs that you like, songs that you want to hear. We’re also honest about our physical, our mental, our spiritual limits, you know. We can’t be on tour for three months at a time anymore, we just can’t. We have families at home, we have other responsibilities that actually take priority over Metallica. Our family, at the moment, is number one. And physically, we try to stay in good shape. We have a physical therapist with us, whatever it takes to stay sane out on the road.

Being in the music industry for so long, you’ve seen it grow and changed so much. What do you think of today’s rock bands? Do you think they can achieve what Metallica has achieved over the years?
I would say it’s difficult for a band to be around for 30 years now, I think. We paid a lot of dues, we toured around a lot. I think there are some bands that don’t really want to work that hard anymore. I think the Internet, obviously, has changed music immensely and what you have to do to sustain your band, I don’t think the bands are making the kind of money that we were, or are, to reinvest in their art. That’s how we got into what we are: reinvestment. We are taking smaller bands out on the road from a record company; the whole system has changed now.

Do you have bands today that you like listening to?
There are bands that I like listening to, that I think is really great. I love Volbeat, I love Gojira – those are the bands we had on the road with us. My nephew has a band. I mean, he just started playing drums maybe four years ago and I can’t believe how good he is. I don’t know what kind of life he will have in music, but he doesn’t care: he loves it, and I see in him, his heart has a burning for it, so success or no success, him doing it is a success to himself.

Besides touring and writing music, you guys also have a 3D movie coming up. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
The idea behind the movie – ‘Through the Never, it’s what it’s called –, maybe over ten years ago, IMAX came to us saying, “We want to capture the energy of a Metallica show”. We felt honoured, but it never really happened until recently. A couple of ideas combined, wanting to do a movie to capture the best of Metallica stage we’ve built, so all the people who have not seen Metallica, we have all of the props and the crazy stage from the indoor shows. Just a lot of the things we’ve done over the years, so filming that in 3D, we’ve even made it even more different. We put a storyline to it, which is about one of the roadies from the show who gets sent on a mission and his life takes a big turn. It’s pretty difficult; it’s like two movies in one actually.

Have you seen it yet?
Have I seen it? Yes. It’s great. I think it’s a big risk for us – everything good usually is – but it’s totally worth it. If it breaks even one day, it’s totally worth it to have this thing as part of the history, where people can see the best of Metallica. Hopefully, it becomes a part of everyone’s music movie library.

There are rumours going around saying that Metallica is working on a new album. Is that true, or is it just a rumour?
(Laughs) That’s a great rumour. We’re always writing in our heads. The movie has been keeping us very busy, and the Asian tour has been keeping us busy as well, so, not yet. We started a little while back but there’s a lot of material.