METALLICA bassist Robert Trujillo spoke to Keith Spera from Nola.com recently about a number of topics. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

Nola.com: On your first tour with Metallica, the band didn't play anything from St. Anger, the then-current album. On this tour, you're playing a lot of Death Magnetic, which implies that the band is much happier with this album than "St. Anger."

Trujillo: "Basically, the material in Death Magnetic was designed with the intention that we would play it live. One of the things Rick Rubin stressed to us was, "Create that hunger again. Try and put together songs that you imagine performing in front of an audience. Have that attitude and mindset that you're trying to get a (record) deal again."

These songs are fairly lengthy and there's definitely moments where things get pretty technical. But the bottom line is they have a live feel. We recorded them standing up, like we were performing. We didn't use a click track on the drums; we just went for it. So you've got these elaborate arrangements, but basically we performed them. And the songs have to groove. You've got to have that groove element when you try to perform these numbers.

The songs on St. Anger, on the other hand, weren't recorded that way. They were edited and formatted on the computer. That's a big difference. That's why we only worked up four songs and ended up playing one or two of them on a consistent basis. We've worked up eight songs from "Death Magnetic" and we're playing four or five."

Nola.com: What was your contribution to the writing process?

Trujillo: "I was there every day when we were writing and arranging the songs. It wasn't a closed shop the way it has been in previous years, where it was, "OK, give us your cassette with ideas, and we'll see you in six months." All these ideas that you hear on Death Magnetic"were riffs and grooves that we physically jammed out, then fused and mixed and matched.

A song like 'Cyanide', for instance. There's a moment where Lars and I are linked, speaking as one. That was inspired ...we had gone to see the Cult the night before and we were getting into their old jams. James started playing that 'Cyanide' riff and we immediately locked in on this pattern together.

To me it's important that Lars and I keep establishing ourselves more as a team, for the bass and drums to connect. That's going to be really important for what we do in the future. That's one of the elements that makes it exciting for me, as a bass player, to be in Metallica.

Metallica is very inspiring. At one point I was taking flamenco guitar lessons. I showed the guys some of the stuff I had learned. Some of those scales and runs actually appear in these songs. They get excited about musical ideas that come from different places. Whether it comes from a semi-classic band like THE CULT or a flamenco guitar scale - it's all music at the end of the day."

Read more here.

Listen to the entire chat at this location.