Producer Bob Rock's CRAZY EDITING EXPLAINED

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Quite often, a band arrives in the studio with at least some material already prepared. Songwriters tend to have a habit of writing new music while on tour supporting the music they've already written. I mean, when you're traveling on the road for hours every day, it can be a great way to kill time. And the fact that they are on stage performing nearly every night means that the songwriter's brain is already functioning in "music" mode. So why not pick up a guitar while sitting in the back of the van heading from Flagstaff to Albequerque and jot some new ideas down?

Metallica is no stranger to this concept. Quite often, frontman James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich would get together to flesh out a tune, and they would bring it to the studio to teach the other band members. But this would not be the case on St Anger, as Metallica intentionally entered the studio without anything pre-written. They wanted this album to be raw, spontaneous, and the result of a group effort. Even if that group was missing one of the four contributing pieces.

As producer Bob Rock explains:

"The idea is it should sound like a band getting together in the garage for the first time, only the band's Metallica." - Rock, Some Kind Of Monster

After Metallica's group effort had created enough songs, producer Bob Rock sat down with all of the material and began stitching it all together like Dr Frankenstein, cutting out parts of songs and rearranging them in his music production software.

"A lot of the songs were done in William Burroughs cut-and-paste fashion... There are movements in movie-making and in music where you take technology as an art and you actually abuse it. Some people use ProTools to trick and fool the listener, but we used it more as a creative tool to do something interesting and stretch boundaries. Technically, you'll hear cymbals go away and you'll hear bad edits. We wanted to disregard what everybody assumes records should be and throw out all the rules. I've spent 25 years learning how to do it the so-called right way. I didn't want to do that anymore." - Rock, 5 Things You Didn't Know About Metallica St Anger, Jon Weiderhorn, Revolver (Jun 5, 2018)

Results were mixed, as many fans, including James Hetfield himself, have admit that St Anger is not exactly their favorite album.

As he told Metal Hammer:

“For me, St Anger kind of stands alone. It’s more of a statement than an album. It’s more of the soundtrack to the movie, in a way. There’s some really interesting and cool riffs, some great songs on there. But sonically it sounds fragmented, which is exactly where we were at the point. But in that fragmentation it brought us together. So it was a very necessary piece of the puzzle to get us where we are today.” - Hetfield, When I'm Happy I'm Writing The Heaviest Riff Possible, Mick Wall, Metal Hammer (July 17, 2023)