Rob Trujillo: ‘Metallica’s Blessing Is Also A Curse’

Metallica recently released their ’72 Seasons’ album and let’s say they weren’t in any shortage of riffs to finish it. Rob Trujillo explained to Bass Player that having too many great ideas is a blessing and a curse. He said:

“One of the beautiful things about being in Metallica is that there’s no shortage of great ideas. Our blessing is also a curse. We have more riffs than we know what to do with. With every handful of riffs, we get out of Kirk, there are another 500 we didn’t hear. I might have ten spare ideas for every one I put forward, things that don’t even get listened to. So I have this arsenal of bass lines and riffs that I sit on.”

There are too many to choose from that they can’t get to some of them. However, for the bass line on ‘Suicide & Redemption’ the bassist knew that it would make the cut as he recalled:

“And it’s not that nobody wanted to listen to them – we just had enough. There comes a point where you don’t need any more. All of these songs have a lot of cool ideas in them. ‘Suicide & Redemption’ from ‘Death Magnetic,’ for instance, was a bass line I had for a long time, and I always had Metallica’s name written on that thing.”

This isn’t the first time that the guys have talked about having too many riffs and ideas to pick from, as they also made similar remarks during their follow-up to 2008’s ‘Death Magnetic’ album. James Hetfield and Rob spoke to Rolling Stone about their overflowing riff stack:

“I only have 846 riffs. In iTunes, you can see how many things you’ve got. And that does not include the soundchecks, the stuff we goof around with.”

The bassist added about the bandmates:

“[James] Hetfield — he’s a writing machine. Kirk [Hammett] has over 300 ideas. There’s so much stuff from the tuning-room jams, from all those years of touring.”

You can reach the Bass Player interview here. You can listen to ‘Suicide & Redemption’ below.