After five years, Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo still sounds in awe of being asked to join one of rock's most legendary thrash-metal acts. His voice escalates at the mere mention of Metallica's past, and he loves the opportunity to dissect late bassist Cliff Burton's parts, a job that wasn't so easy five years ago when he came into the fold.
"It was very difficult," Trujillo said during an interview with LiveDaily from a tour stop in Ontario, CA. "There were times where they'd want to do a song 45 minutes before the show and I'd say, 'Oh my God.' I'd have my Discman on. I'm taking notes. Just barely getting by. It's one of those things where we were in this headspace where we wanted to really test ourselves. At times, we'd nail the songs. Other times, it'd be near train wrecks. That was the theme of what we were doing. The good thing about that is it opened the doors to the old stuff.
"For me, I love trying to play Cliff Burton's parts and getting into the 'Ride the Lightning' stuff and obviously 'Master of Puppets.' It was a great honor to play on the reunion tour for that in Europe, the 20-year reunion, and dissect all the bass parts and the guitar parts. Kirk and James were relearning their parts. They had forgotten how the stuff went. That was cool. That was around the time we were preparing the music for 'Death Magnetic.' It was kind of an interesting relation there in terms of the headspace that it put us in, James and Lars specifically."
Metallica is winding down its US tour in support of "Death Magnetic," its first album of new material in more than six years.
Trujillo spoke to LiveDaily about Metallica's four Grammy nominations for "Death Magnetic," his learning experiences with Hammett, Hetfield and Ulrich, and traveling with his and his bandmates' children.
LiveDaily: Congratulations on your Grammy nominations. At this point in your career, what do those Grammy nominations mean to you?
Robert Trujillo: It depends on the situation. Obviously, if you're Milli Vanilli and you get nominated for seven Grammys and then you have them taken away from you, it's not the greatest thing in the world. [For us,] it's an honor. We worked very hard on this record. Metallica, one thing I can say is definitely the work ethic is next level. It's been a great learning experience. I've been in a lot of situations, as you know. It's been a seriously great learning experience to sit alongside Hetfield and Lars and help them compose a song and watch the arranging process. It's like going to the best school of songwriting you could ever imagine. To be recognized for our efforts is wonderful and we're happy about that.
What is the most important thing you learned so far from them?
Definitely in the world of Metallica there's a lot of detail that comes into the picture Someone like James, like in his lyrics, for each word he'll have three words. He's very organized. Each song has a special font--the way it's written and everything about it. And that kind of detail goes into learning guitar parts or developing his vocal harmonies. It's really impressive to see that in them. Arranging songs, right down to the small details in the rhythms and the transitions and stuff. One of the coolest things about this body of music, to me, is [producer] Rick Rubin wanted us to write a batch of music that we could perform live. And we did that--right down to recording it. [Rubin said], "Everybody stand up and play like you're performing these songs." The whole theme was [to] kind of like try and imagine ourselves trying to impress an audience who doesn't know who we are at a small bar or a backyard party. We kind of went into that zone. He had Lars and James really reunite with the past and the thrashy years. That's why there's definitely moments of the old school on there, too.
I think that's one thing that's really pleased fans is that Metallica has gone back to those years.
Yeah. For me, too, as a bass player it's a lot of fun. It's a challenging body of music, but it's a lot of fun. Again, just an idea that I'm a part of these songs, I know them. There's times when they're asking me how a part goes. That feels good, when they go "What's that note?" "How do we do this?" It feels good to have them ask me and not me having to ask them for information regarding specific songs.
How have you seen the band grow since you joined Metallica almost six years ago?
In a lot of ways: For starters, me, personally and Kirk, we've now got children. When I first joined Metallica back in 2003, I wasn't married, I didn't have kids. Now I’m sitting here with a 2-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son, happily married. That's a major transition in one's life. When I first joined the band, I was kind of like the boy in the bubble. I really had to focus on being a part of this band and learning over 23 years of catalog at the time, then learning all the "St. Anger" material, which was really crazy. So I had to create this bubble environment, so I could only focus on that. That would have been difficult with the full-on family back then. And then also Kirk, as I mentioned, has a couple kids as well. Lars had a child just over a year ago. There's a lot of new magic in the band, somewhere we can all connect, where we share the same interests. Outside of a lot of things like family, we don't have a lot of the same interests. We're all different. Our families sort of bring us together. The music brings us together, definitely. It's nice to have the family aspect in there too, something we obviously love and cherish. We can all share that.
Does your family travel with you?
Sometimes. It depends. In the summertime, we'll hub out of certain locations. My wife's from France. We'll kind of hub out of France, and Kirk will as well. Then we'll, say, we fly to Italy or wherever, and we'll come back to the homestead which is in Paris or something. Oftentimes, we'll do that together. We'll set up shop in London or whatever. We spent a lot of time in Europe this past summer. We were there from May all the way up until the end of summer, 'til September. But it's good to be back in the States and have this new record to get out there and perform for our peeps.
What do you see for the future of Metallica? You have one more album left on your deal with Warner Bros., correct?
Basically, I don't know the technical details. I can only tell you this: outside of the business side of things--which is probably what you're asking me--on a creative level, the sky's the limit. To me, "Death Magnetic" is only a launch pad. We're already jamming on new ideas and new riffs. There's a rhythm-section thing that I'm feeling with Lars that I'd like to dive into even more so with the future. It's great to be playing thrashy, heavy riffs again, too. That's one of the things with this band--there's no shortage of musical ideas. When you check out some of the other bands that have been around for so many years, sometimes the hardest thing is to stay motivated. Sometimes bands will end up playing almost like-- how do you say it?--a tribute scenario where they're playing all the hits all the time. That's cool. But the future of [that type of] band doesn't seem as interesting. I think we still got it in us to create interesting music and to get even better with it. That's kind of fun.
I understand you change the set list every night. That must keep it fresh as well.
It's a lot of fun right now. There's such an extensive catalog and now, with the new songs, it's really fun. We enjoy playing them. That's the key thing. We actually like playing these songs and we're challenged by them. They're not easy songs to play. But we're excited to attack them. Right now, we're playing six of the new songs and they seem to be going over really well live, which is very cool. On the last album ["St. Anger"], I think we only worked up three songs and at the end of the day, we were only doing one or two. Pretty much one song. Then we weren't playing any of them. We do change the set up, but the good thing is we got new stuff in there too. We have a lot of the old stuff. It's a very well-balanced set. As far as them pulling up some songs that I may not know, we've been doing this for so long now, as far as shows and touring and going in and out of Europe, that it's become a little bit easier for me. It wasn't so easy five years ago.
Интервью Роберто Трухийо
-
nomad-vagabond
- Сообщения: 289
- Зарегистрирован: 12 мар 2008 15:15
- Откуда: Dnipro, Ukraine
- Контактная информация:
Только читал еще одно его интервью, сюда же http://artistdirect.com/nad/news/articl ... 89,00.html
-
Drummergirl
- Сообщения: 576
- Зарегистрирован: 30 янв 2006 20:54
- Откуда: Петербург
-
Иннокентий
- Сообщения: 2226
- Зарегистрирован: 09 июн 2004 21:55
- Откуда: Днипро