lars ulrich

METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich was interviewed earlier this month on the "La Viola" show on the Argentinian TV channel TN. You can now watch the report below. A couple of excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET). On whether all the criticism has encouraged METALLICA to do things differently over the years: Ulrich: "I think METALLICA has been criticized more or less since the beginning. I mean, the hard rock fans take it very seriously, and I think sometimes too seriously. They're very vocal — they're passionate — but sometimes you have to kind of balance that off with saying, 'Okay, everybody, let's just calm down. It's just rock and roll,' or whatever. So I think we try to find the right balances. The members of METALLICA have always been very curious and very interested in different things and open to different ways of doing things. I think when we were young, when you're not so confident, when we were young, we were really trying to play a lot and show how talented we were. Now, I think, we're not so worried about whether people think we're talented or not. Now, because we're so comfortable with who we are… I think as you get a little older and get a little more experience, you become less worried about what people think of you and you become more comfortable with yourself. I think we've always tried with our fans to say, 'We are METALLICA and we will do things our way, we will do it differently. Come along for the ride, but if you wanna come along for that ride, know that it's gonna be a ride that's gonna take us to many different places." On whether he and the rest of METALLICA were joking when they said they were "Beliebers" — a.k.a. fans of pop singer Justin Bieber: Ulrich: "No. You know, he's a talented kid. He's talented. I mean, obviously, he doesn't make it easy for himsef, and I can only imagine how difficult it must be to have to deal with everybody being on top of him 24 hours a day; I don't wish that upon anybody." On what kind of music he listens to in his spare time: Ulrich: "I listen mostly to what my kids listen to, 'cause they always hijack the stereo, they steal the stereo in the car. We get into the car and they take control of the iPod. So, thankfully, my kids listen to SYSTEM OF A DOWN, FOO FIGHTERS, ARCTIC MONKEYS, QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE, AC/DC…" On what it's like being in METALLICA in 2014: Ulrich: "It's exciting. It's been an exciting time. The last, I don't know, six months, we finished our movie, we went to the Antarctic, we played the Grammys again, which was nice. We've started writing songs and preparing for the next record, so that's very exciting. We're down here among all of you beautiful people and playing [the] 'By Request' [setlist] and going to new places. We were in Quito two days ago, where we'd never been [before]. We're playing a new song ['The Lords Of Summer'] on stage, which people seem to be very receptive to. We're writing away. We've got some good ideas. Our biggest problem is not the ideas, our biggest problem is time. METALLICA is busier than ever, and it just seems like there's more and more going on and the days get shorter and shorter. But, hopefully, we will be done writing this year and next year we should record and hopefully have a new record out maybe next year. We'll see. Hopefully next year."

The Talks recently conducted an interview with METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below. The Talks: Back in the '80s it seems like metal was also not as mainstream as it is today. Do you agree? Lars: I am not the person to ask that kind of question to, but certainly the world is a smaller place than it was 20 or 30 years ago. When you were going to different corners in the world the local aesthetics were much more prevalent at that time. We just did a run in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, China and all these places and it is still Starbucks and Burger King and the same sort of thing that it is everywhere else in the world. The first time we were in Japan in 1986 it was like going to a different universe. The first time we went behind the Iron Curtain in 1988 we went to Hungary it was like going to the moon. Nowadays music penetrates on a global basis in a way it probably didn't do before. The Talks: How have you learned to deal with the enormous expectations from a band of METALLICA's stature? Lars: I think you just train yourself like anything. You train yourself to block it out and you got to have to train yourself hard because nowadays with the Internet and with everybody having an opinion it is harder, you have to be more careful as you navigate through a lot of that stuff as people say some very, very unpleasant things. 20 years ago you would make a record and somebody would critique the record. Like, "This is a good record, this is not a good record. This is why it is not a good record." Whatever. Now it is like, "Lars Ulrich must fucking die!" Do you know what I mean? It is like a different thing and it is much more a scathing and there is a whole kind of thing about expectations and people express their viewpoints, both good and bad and so on. If you pay attention to it, you have to learn how to not own it. You have to learn to not take it with you. And I am pretty thick-skinned, so I think we have a fairly good balance. The Talks: A lot of people argue that METALLICA made a string of shitty records from the mid-'90s until the 2000s and your last record in 2008 was your first return to form in around 20 years. How do you view that? Lars: The bad thing the Internet is that at some point everything becomes these super short sound bites. Everything is sort of getting shorter and shorter because people have a shorter and shorter attention span and there's a tendency to define everything. So define METALLICA: "METALLICA had a bunch of pioneering records in the '80s and then they had a slump in the '90s and then they figured it all out again in the 2000s." If our slump was the mid-'90s, I think that's pretty good. We pushed four records out in four years — '96, '97, '98, '99 — and if those four records are our not-great records, then I'm pretty happy with that because I think all four of those records are pretty fucking cool. The Talks: So how would you define METALLICA? Lars: Listen, each one of those records, each one of those time frames, was always the best it could be at the time, the most it could be, the best we had to offer. The one thing I'll always hold my head up high about is that 32 years later, it's been quite a ride — it's been a pretty pure ride, a pretty honest ride, a pretty straight ride — we haven't done things for ulterior motives or tried to do things for commercial gains or for this or for that, so I feel pretty proud of all of it. I think I can look myself in the mirror and go, "It's okay," because that was what I felt at the moment and I did my best. I'm pretty pleased with the first 32 years, so we'll see what the next 32 years bring. Read the entire interview at The Talks.