Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich is this week's guest on the podcast SmartLess, hosted by actors Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett, and he goes off on how much he and the rest of the band love what they do.
According to Ulrich, "The key thing as an artist… I think when you write songs...you wanna start a conversation, you want people to engage, you want people to hear your music.''
He says that Metallica ''just love writing songs and we love making records and we love the creative process.'' He explains that, ''There are a lot of bands that have been around as long as we have that simply don't wanna make records anymore, because it either doesn't work for them or the business model of it doesn't work for them." Metallica are not one of them.
He says that what keeps Metallica functioning is that they go from writing to recording to playing gigs to writing to home. They're always changing up what they're doing so they ''never get stuck in the sameness over and over.'' They're not always on the road, not always in the studio, not always taking their kids to school or whatever. He thinks '''you have to kind of keep just breaking it up and changing what you're doing."
Although he understands that Metallica are exceptionally fortunate, he feels their success gives them the opportunity to...do all that, "But if somebody said, 'You can't write or make records anymore,' we would probably stop what we're doing, because it's such an essential part of just our existence as people."