Interview: Kirk Hammett Discusses Metallica's 'Death Magnetic'

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Hitting the reset button has become a theme for Hammett and his band over the past year. After spending much of the decade redefining their sound, Metallica have gone full circle and returned to the crunching, thrash-metal style that established them as the world’s greatest hard rock band in the Eighties. While it’s tempting to attribute this dramatic about-face to their superstar producer Rick Rubin, Kirk explains that the band did much of the heavy lifting on their new album, Death Magnetic, themselves.

“Rick was important because he planted the creative seeds, but he left the lion’s share of the execution to us,” Hammett explains. “It was a great relationship, because he gave us guidance but left our core intact. For example, if there were anything he thought was substandard, or just wrong for us, he would just tell us to write something else; he wouldn’t try to tell us how. There was a lot of mutual respect.”

When asked why, after 20-plus years in the business, Metallica didn’t just produce the record themselves, Hammett laughs and shakes his head. “We need an outsider, or else a lot of creative decisions would become stalemates and we’d never get anything done,” he says, referring to band’s notoriously turbulent relationship. “We need a tiebreaker. Maybe if there were a fifth person in the band it could work, but at this point we’re not about to get a keyboard player.”

One thing the band could apparently agree on was to give Hammett plenty of room to rip. Considering that he was all but forbidden to play solos on the group’s previous studio effort, St. Anger, it’s both a shock and a relief to hear him cut loose on Death Magnetic. As frontman James Hetfield explains in the accompanying interview, putting one of the greatest soloists in rock history on a short leash probably wasn’t a good idea. To Metallica’s credit, they’ve more than made up for the error by allowing Hammett to play fast, loud and long throughout Death Magnetic. In fact, one could argue that Kirk practically owns the album.

I would say it sits somewhere in between …And Justice for All and the “Black Album.” It has an aggressive, technical side, like Justice, but there’s also a lot of melody, like the “Black Album.” We wrote the album with every intention of it being just a kick in the face, and I think we pulled it off. We’ve been working on it for long enough—close the three years. At one point we had 24 songs, and we had to tear it down to 14, and it has even fewer now, but I think it’s everything that we wanted to hear.

Yeah. [laughs] Well, we spent a long time trying to distance ourselves from our early music to prove to ourselves that we’re more than just that. And that’s pretty much what the Nineties were. We were just exploring our own potential creatively and figuring out what we were capable of and what we could get away with. We’ve passed that. And now we just wanna go out there and be the world’s heaviest band again.

Well, I went through a whole blues period in the Nineties and that had some influence on Load and ReLoad. Then I started listening to a lot of jazz—stuff like Kenny Burrell, Tal Farlow, Grant Green and Wes Montgomery—guys who were just monsters on the guitar. It was a great education, because I discovered where all of my rock heroes got a lot of their licks. Jeff Beck, Clapton, Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimmy Page all took ideas from those players and turned them into the vocabulary of their generation.

I drew it all in, and it changed my style totally. However, a couple years ago I started feeling like I was going too deep. I’m back to being primarily a metal guitarist, but some of the blues and jazz ideas have changed me in important ways. My improvisation skills have really improved—I flow a lot better; I’m putting a lot more faith in my abilities to be spontaneous—whereas in the past I would compose my solos. Ninety percent of the time my solos on past albums were composed, where now, I would say, it’s maybe 40 percent.

I’ve been pushing myself to the limit in the studio—right to the very edge of the abyss. And I took my playing into areas I’ve never been before. I’m currently relearning the songs for our upcoming tour, and I’m scratching my head going, “What did I do there?” I can’t remember what I did, and I can’t figure it out. I might need the transcribers at Guitar World to help me! [laughs]

Love them. I love his work. What Alex is doing by putting heavy metal songs in a jazz context is completely refreshing. His take on [the Kiss classic] “Detroit Rock City” [from 2002’s Goodbye to Romance: Standards for a New Generation] blew me away; that song has never sounded better to me. And when you think about, the old jazz standards were the pop music of their time. So Alex has updated the notion of what a standard is, and it’s opened up all the current music to interpretation. The idea of playing Kiss or the Scorpions in the style of Dave Brubeck is great and quite radical. There are tons of people at Julliard who are playing [Thelonious Monk’s jazz standard] “Straight No Chaser” for probably the 50 millionth time, so it’s about time somebody tried something new.

I’ve added more midrange to my overall sound. I can still appreciate my original scooped sound, but I need to feel the ground shake when I hit a chord. It hasn’t been any radical change in gear as much as it’s been a change in EQ. For Death Magnetic I used what I always use, which is my standard touring rack, which is filled with some Boogie stuff and a Marshall that I’ve had forever. I also used the new Randall amp that I helped design, and Greg Fidelman, our engineer, turned James and me onto Ampeg heads. Ampeg made incredible guitar heads in the early Nineties and then stopped. And I don’t know why. The one we used had a nice clean, warm sound, and it blended well with the other amps that were in the studio.

I’m a total vintage freak and would have liked to use more of my collectible amps, but we got the sound that worked for the sonic context, and I really didn’t want to make it more complicated. The same goes for guitars. I used a few vintage guitars here and there. I think I used a ’58 Paul and a ’59 Tele on some clean stuff, but overall, almost everything is done on my ESP Mummy and the Caution guitar, which is the original “Skully” [KH-2 Kirk Hammett signature] guitar—the very first ESP guitar, from 1987.

I was shocked by how much people missed guitar solos and my playing on St. Anger. I just thought it would be water off their backs, and it wouldn’t be that big of a difference. On tour, however, at least five people would ask me every single day why there weren’t guitar solos on the album and if there were going to be guitar solos on the next album. To tell you the truth, I had no idea that people considered that aspect, or that ingredient, to be such a large part of our overall sound. I always saw myself more as icing on the cake. But goddamn it, man, those people really like that icing!

I don’t have a clear answer to that question. I’m too close to it. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that young players—I mean 10- and 12-year-olds—really like my guitar style. There’s something in my guitar style that they totally can latch onto and learn quickly, and then go from there to your Yngwie Malmsteens or your Steve Vais or whatever. On the flipside, the more mature musicians hear my stuff and go, “Eh, whatever.”

That’s always been my thing. I love Michael Schenker because he plays the hookiest solos. I’ve always been attracted to players who are not necessarily melodic but very hooky. Ritchie Blackmore has a very hooky style, and he’s not very melodic at all. A lot of times, the stuff he plays comes out of left field, but it’s catchy, and there’s an integrity to it that just kind of pulls at you.

From the very beginning, I’ve always put taste, phrasing, tone, melody and hookiness before speed and pure technicality. I’ve always played for the song, and I’ve always played to entertain people. And I’ve never purposely played anything to alienate people.
When you play a great lick that you haven’t played before, it’s amazing, because it feels like it’s been handed down to you from the heavens. It flows through your fingers, onto the strings, to the pickups and out the amp, and suddenly you hear this great thing. You recognize it as the entire creative process. And sometimes that happens so quickly and so unexpectedly. It’s as if there’s a big crack in the ground and this big hairy paw hands you this heavy guitar riff. There are no preconceptions, no premeditations. I’m sure it happens to most dedicated musicians. It may not happen as often to the casual strummer, but if your heart is into it, it happens.

I’m way into the metaphysics of the subconscious and multidimensional thinking. I know that vibrations connect all of these things. And if you really want to get technical, I buy into the string theory of physics. The basic principle is that everything in the universe is made of these vibrating strings. It’s nice to think that the cosmos is essentially a huge guitar and inspiration comes when I’m tuned into it.

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