James Hetfield makes no bones about channeling his inner demons for Metallica's new music. Blabbermouth transcribed Hetfield talking in a new promo video about the band's new album, 72 Seasons — which drops on April 14th — where he shed light on the album's sometimes extremely dark inspiration.
Hetfield revealed, “There's been a lot of darkness in my life and in our career and things that have happened with us, but always having a sense of hope, always having the light that is in that darkness. . . Without darkness, there is no light, and being able to focus a little more on the light in life instead of how it used to be and how horrible it is.”
He went on to say, “There's a lot of good things going on in life — focusing on that instead, and it helps to balance out my life. And there's no one meaning to it — everyone has some sense of hope or light in their life, and, obviously, music is mine.”
A while back James Hetfield told us that upon entering alcohol rehabilitation, he learned that anger can be a good thing. “You can handle anger and use anger in a positive sense. I felt I can take anger and be assertive with it. It also helps me protect, like, if something's going wrong you can protect your family. I mean there's a lot of good uses for anger that I never saw before. This is all new to me, and if it's completely 101 for most people, that's fine, but for me this is pretty profound.”