Speaking in a recent interview on the “Toby Morse One Life One Chance” podcast, Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo admitted that he was initially “consumed” by the “workload” when he joined the band in 2003.
“I was just thinking about the workload. I couldn’t think about the money or anything. I was like, ‘I’ve gotta learn to sing more, I’ve got a lot more responsibility, I have a catalog of material that goes [back] 20 years. And then, there was this new album, ‘St. Anger’, which they had already recorded, and they never even played those songs [live] together, really. Bob [Rock, producer] played bass on that. I had to learn those songs on top of the catalog,” he said.
“I was also confused because I didn’t know what songs were going to be in the set in the near future, because I was never told. So I would ask, Lars… and then I would ask Kirk, and I’d ask James. And the set lists were all different, because no one knew exactly what they were going to play. And then, at that time, they wanted to get into the older material, which was a good thing… But with that, there’s more songs to learn.”
“Like, Lars would say, ‘I think I want to play ‘Phantom Lord’ tonight, and it’s, like, two o’clock. So, I had a lot of charts, I had a lot of what I call cheat sheets. And I had to survive through those. These days, I don’t really like that. I want to feel the song, so I always try to prepare way in advance.”
