Molly: Why the album, an album of covers?
James: The first one we did ['Garage Days'] showed the some of newer fans where we are from, and basically our roots. When we first started as Metallica we didn't have any of our own songs and we were playing cover songs from these more obscure kind of British metal bands that no one in California knew so we instantly had a set list. We played them, we didn't tell them they weren't us.
Molly: Who were you playing back then?
James: We were playing a lot of Diamond Head stuff, a band called Sweet Savage, another band just called Savage, Blitzkrieg, and slowly we started writing our own songs, and started to replace the covers with our own. When we first got Jason in the band, it was a good way to break him in, we got into the studio instead of trying to write songs with this really heavy vibe, we just played some cover songs and get a really good feeling. So those first 'Garage Days' worked really well, we took it off the market with the exact idea of doing this thing, adding to it, and taking all the B-sides off it that people don't get in every country. It's a good collection.
Molly: Metallica are not frightened to do covers, and at times by Metallica doing the cover, you have given light to that band, I mean The Misfits especially.
James: Absolutely, there's a few ads for Misfits shirts in a few of the rock magazines now. But what's interesting
is we did some of these bands like Diamond Head, they had kind of been gone, and after we did the cover album, they thought about it and went, let's get back together while this name is out there and try and do a tour, maybe an album, so Diamond Head actually played a big show with us, and this other band Holocaust, who actually go back together, and
ironically they covered 'Master Of Puppets'. It wasn't the best version of 'Puppets' I've heard, but it was a valiant
effort.
Molly: With this selection of songs that you've done now, there is such a broad range. If I thought Metallica was
going to do (Thin Lizzy) 'Whisky in a Jar', I would have gone, 'No, come on', and Nick Cave, but why Thin Lizzy?
James: We've been fans of Lizzy forever, and picking 'Whisky' was … we didn't really didn't want to take the obvious,
like 'Boys are Back in Town', we wanted to take a more obscure song, and 'Whisky' isn't even actually their song, it's public domain now actually.
Molly: It's a folk song really.
James: An Irish drinking song. They're all drinking songs. [They both laugh.] But Thin Lizzy put their kind of rock stamp on it, we screwed it up more, and it actually came out pretty well. A few of the tracks we picked were bands that we always wanted to do, and now was the right time to do it, and Black Sabbath was one. We couldn't decide 'Sabracadabra' or 'National Acrobat' so we combined the two together. Most of them are older influences, Diamond Head again, Misfits, Blue Oyster Cult, Thin Lizzy, and Discharge, a punk band that really crossed over to the metal kids when we growing up. We'd be at parties at our hose, and we'd put Tank on, we'd put Venom on, and Iron Maiden, GBH and the Anti-Nowhere League,
the Discharge, and it just meshed all together, there was no kind of punk/metal fighting going on, and actually some of these
bands, like Discharge, I had discovered through going to a Motorhead show. I went to go see Motorhead, and I'm there in my denim jacket with all the Saxon patches and things, and I look over and there's spiked green hair and Discharge and GBH shirts. That really turned me onto some of the punk stuff. Discharge had some kind of production and riffs, riffs was the main thing, but also there's some new influences. Nick Cave for one.
Molly: Nick Cave, I find this so interesting, not just cos he's Australian, but the song itself, 'Loverman', the way you sing this..
James: That song was so easy to sing it was scary.
Molly: It is scary to hear it!
James: Compared to some of the other ones we tried,  like the King Diamond, most of them were "waaaaahhhh", voices
way up there, or even the early Sabbath stuff was more difficult to hit. The Nick Cave stuff, it flew out. Something evil, something attitude-wise, it was instantly there. It felt good.
Molly: Lyrically, it's one thing, but the way you deliver the lyrics. It's scary, it's got a great sound about it.
James: I've learnt a little bit about dynamics through his music, so he is an influence of mine more recently, so it's good to put that on the record as well some of the older ones.
Molly: Would it be fair to say with you James, you've grown as a lyricist, but also vocally … you seem to have a total grasp on your vocals now.
James: I'm a lot more confident of singing these days. Touring for 16 years straight will make you confident of what
you are singing and how your delivery is and things. And actually doing covers, and seeing what your voice can do, that it maybe didn't before, trying to get into some different ranges, and not just vocally musically, songwriting-wise and drumming, guitar playing, doing these covers. It tests your musicianship, and you'll go and play things you wouldn't have written on your own. And it make your fingers move a different way, spur you on to try something new.
Molly: The time you've spent in the studio of recording these tracks, and given that they are so diverse in themselves,
one day doing Nick Cave, then next day a Sabbath song, was that hard?

James : We put all these songs on the table, and we just digested them, then spit them out Metallica style. There's only so much you can mess with the sounds, you know. When you go in to hear back a song or to listen to a mix, I dial in that guitar sound that I love. It's not going to change things drastically, and Lars drum sounds, so it ends up sounding like Metallica. Some of them were a little more difficult than others. 'Astronomy' was one that was a far cry from Kirk's basement to
actually mixing the song, and it came quite a long ways.
Molly: How much did you prepare for this in Kirk's basement forinstance?
James: The first 'Garage Days' we recorded a lot quicker but we rehearsed for two weeks, and it was only five and a half, six songs. This one it was 10 and we only rehearsed about four days from the time we heard the, like Lars had never heard the Nick Cave song before. I hand him the CD, he puts it in his head, and he's playing the song, and all of a sudden we are
recording it, less than a week later. So there was a lot more kind of spur of the moment stuff, a lot more vibe. It was definitely a lot more fun.
Molly: You haven't tested these songs out on an audience?
James: We know some of the punkier kind of stuff does work, the Anti-Nowhere League, The Misfits stuff really works. 'Die Die My Darling' by the Misfits was one I chose because I thought it would work well live. Exploring new places, like the
Loverman', like 'Turn the Page' and 'Whisky In The Jar', just going where Metallica doesn't belong is kind of fun for me.
Molly: Your version of 'Turn the Page' is superb, are you a BobSeger fan?
James: Actually I can't stand Bob Seger. I've never met him, so it's nothing really against him, but you know, growing up ... the radio ..."take them old records off the shelf", that was all I ever heard on the radio, and it was like, play some Aerosmith or
something. I would just turn the radio off, it would drive me up the wall. It was more the song, the song, lyrically especially, it belonged to Metallica, 'On The Road Again'. We are road dogs and it's one song we can really relate to and it came out really well.
Molly: You really have given it the Metallica stamp, but it holds its uniqueness as well.
James: You choose a song because you like it, you don't really analyse why, but that song is vocal melody, purely that vocal melody carries that whole song. There's a lot of songs we chose just on vibe of the song, you know, riff, 'It's Electric', Diamond Head.
Molly : Tell us about that.
James: We're not shy on doing Diamond Head covers, this'll be our fourth or our fifth one, but we didn't choose it for the lyrics, I'll put it that way. 'I want to be a rock & roll star', a lot of these songs had some not-so-amazing lyrics, it's a little hard
to get behind them when you are singing them, but Diamond Head were always a favourite of ours because of their songwriting. When Metallica first started going, it was the two "heads", Motorhead and Diamond Head: Motorhead for the noise and the sheer aggression, and Diamond Head for a little more of the riffs and the songwriting, a little more epic with their
stuff.
Molly: When did you decide you wanted to write songs?
James: Well, I never really ... I am not the kind of guy that will sit on the road and write poems, or write stuff on a napkin, maybe Nick Cave does, and just write things out and go,"that's really great". It'susually "here's the song, we've gotta have some singing on it, why don't you try and jam some words in there?" I was never really the singer, it was more or less "we need someone to sing and I'll do it. I'm not that busy, I'm playing rhythm I can do something else". But we were always looking for another singer, we wanted a front man, you're never going to make it in rock if you
don't have a front man.
Molly: You're joking.
James: No, that was it, man. But slowly over time I became more and more confident of my singing, and maybe sometimes
I would sacrifice some of the guitar-playing to hit a certain note, so over the years it's become my gig.
Molly: Do you think about how you are going to twist your voice around to sing it when you're writing?
James: That kind of comes hand in hand. There's certain vowels and words that my throat is used to wrapping itself
around. There's a few words in some of these lyrics that just tonally don't sound really good when you are singing them, but you kind of bend around that, it's not so audible but your throat just kind of does its thing naturally.
Molly: When you were doing to vocals on this album, back in Kirk's dungeon, vocally were you testing it all out?
James: Yeah, I was really concerned about the Merciful Fate stuff, because King Diamond has a quite unique voice
and fashion that he has. I wasn't too sure what the hell I was gonna do. I knew that any way it would be my interpretation of his singing. Usually I just throw a cassette in the truck and test out the waters that way, just kind of yell when no one's around. But some of the early Sabbath thing was really high, young Ozzy, literally high! We had to tune that song down a bit,
and also made it a little chunkier on the guitars, but it allowed me to get up to that famous "feel all right...", so I could hang on that.
Molly: Going back to the Merciful Faith thing, which is a medley, did you do it in parts, from one song to another? It's not exactly in the same mood or mode.
James: That's the beauty of covers, you can do what you want with them, they're already there for you. Everything's written, and if you chop it up and move it around, you can always blame it on, "it's only a cover". But especially with the Merciful Faith stuff, their songs were so, they'd go from one riff to another like that, reminds me of some of the Justice stuff we were doing. So it was kinda easy to cut and paste the Merciful Faith stuff. And it just became really, an exercise in memory than actual ability. It actually came out a lot better than I really expected.
Molly: With you and Lars working together on this, where things would dominate - the drums, guitar, your vocals, the mixing. Was there tense time in the mixing?
James: If there's not a tense time, then something's wrong. We have to argue. (Sighs heavily.) That's just part of the process, we'll talk about - this is gonna be easy, we're just gonna throw this stuff up, the bed tracks … then we'll get in there, and … the kick drum's gotta come up, then the vocals … and you start butting heads, but we do kinda step on each other's toes … at the end of the day we're trying to get it to sound as good as possible, huge and fat, and it takes a few arguments, and we've been at it for 17 years and we haven't drawn blood yet. No stretchers or ambulances shown up, so it's okay.
Molly: With that Nick Cave song, the vocals, the guitar, drums and bass, has its space, which is pretty cool. It could've been pretty cluttered but it's not.
James: It's actually helped doing it in a short period of time. If you have time to kill with songs, then you start thinking too much, adding things, you forget what the original melody was, what carried that part, why you even liked the damn song. You start adding bells and whistles, you gotta really strip down and go back to the demos … I think we could feel pretty proud of ourselves that we've done this, and you know, every time we get a project done quicker, I think it's good for our egos, thinking we can do this quicker, we don't need all this extra time to screw things up.
Molly: Does Bob Rock ever stop you at times, and say, it's not working, let's do it this way?
James: No, he'll let us figure it out for ourselves. He'll offer opinions … but usually, with this project, we know each other very well, and it came together a lot easier, we walked in and we got guitar sounds in one day. He knows what I'm after. He knows what Lars likes and we saved a lot of time that way, using Bob again.
Molly: This morning, hearing another track, 'Tuesday's Gone', Lynyrd Skynyrd, that blew me right out.
James: Well, yep. The Skynyrd was spurred on by the Neil Young Bridge School benefit show and it was all-acoustic, acoustic or nothing, or else and we were thinking about doing some acoustic in Metallica, butthis was the prime time to jump in and do it all acoustic. Blame it on Neil Young. So we were up there just jamming away, and it was actually a lot of fun. And 'Tuesday's Gone' was one of the songs we kinda worked out. And it was a total spur of the moment thing, sittin' in Kirk's place, just started fiddlin' with that, and we had the song together, and it felt pretty good … there's such a vibe with that song, we felt we should put it on this CD.
Molly: Now that you've almost completed this, is this going to be a new approach to the next Metallica album, maybe?
James: The approaches I'd like to bring is, let's shorten this recording time up, let's rehearse more, come in a little
more rehearsed, and let's hit it and keep refreshed, and the other thing,I think we got some pretty fat sounds, and didn't clutter it up with too much stuff … concentrated and filled the holes in the right spots and went with a little more loose, kinda live jam vibe …
Molly: With the DVD that you've done. You seem to go off into all these different places, almost like, do you dare tread there … Is it an adventure for you?
James: DVD is something that will stick around for a few weeks at least. It's just intriguing that you can … it's like video tape with different tracks, you can go different places. Someone, when they explained it to us, said, when you play 'For Whom The Bell Tolls', and you can switch between camera angles yourself. We said, we gotta do that, so Lars can sit and watch himself the whole gig. And just even going, backstage, and seeing what's going on, while you're up there playin' that 'Bells' song, who's counting the money or which roadie's asleep over there. It's very intriguing to us - unlimited possibilities with it. So we thought we'd be the first ones to attack it, in the heavy rock genre.
Molly: With Diamond Head and the different ones you have covered, would it be fair to say you're a fan?
James: Yes. The only reason we're doing these songs is because we like the bands, we like the songs, there was something about them that hit us when we were growing up, being sponges with music. They're really the bands that have moulded Metallica. Actually there was someone who sent a question to the Metallica club, that asked, what non-Metallica song would you like to have written? And it's kind of all of these really, songs we wish we had written, but now we can play them. Lars' 12 minutes of being in Merciful Faith finally, or me actually getting in Nick's shoes, which is kinda fun …
Molly: Let's take it back to when I interviewed you and Jason, just before 'Load' there was this apprehension of a new valley you were heading into … was there apprehension back then with you.
James: At the beginning of every album, more or less in the songwriting, it's like, boy, where's this stuff gonna come from, where am I gonna get some fuel from, and by the time you're done worrying about it, you've already got something there. We do tend to wind ourselves up, but at the end of the day, everything kinda flows naturally, and you really can't go wrong when you it comes out that way … Whatever happens next to us, will be a very much a natural progression …

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