Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich and legendary cellist Yo-Yo Ma took part in a "fireside chat" on November 21 as part of Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. The 50-minute discussion is available for streaming below.

Asked at what point he committed to music, and knew that this was what he wanted to do, Ulrich reveals: "I'm still waiting to commit to it full time... we'd like to think that our best years are still in front of us. But, I think that... you know, when tennis... so, in Denmark, which is a country about this big, I was ranked in the Top 10 in the different age groups, and then we moved to Southern California for me to pursue it full time, and I wasn't ranked in the Top 10 on the street that I lived on in Orange County. That kind of stole the thunder. Music had always been hovering, and was sort of my passion, and so I just drifted into music without really thinking about it. It's only now, when you sit and talk, and try to intellectualize what you were thinking at the time, that you can come up with these answers and put it into soundbites. But when I think back to that time, we never thought, really, about what we were doing, we just did it. There was this instinctive thing that was driving us, and I think, as you get older and you sit and talk about your process and your outlook and how it all sort of works, occasionally you wish that you still had that complete, uninhibited instinct that  you never questioned. So when I think back to those formative years, you just did, and you followed something..."

Lars continues: "For me also, I think a big part of it was that I was an only child. I was very close with my parents, but also felt that I really didn't connect to a lot of my peers. So being in music, and especially being in a collective, being in a group, gave me a sense of identity, of belonging to something that was bigger than myself, and I think, at that time, was probably the primary driving force, just belonging to something."