No one has a perfect career and since everyone is human, we all make mistakes we regret later and with a band it isn’t different. In an interview with Steffan Chirazi, Metallica‘s drummer and co-founder Lars Ulrich talked about their discography and regret. He said that everything happened in the way it should because good moments of their career wouldn’t have happened if the bad ones dind’t existed.
Lars Ulrich talks about regret and Metallica’s discography
“Regret is an interesting word because there’s so much weight in that. I think as human beings, you can’t ‘not regret’ things that you’ve done in the past. But regret does not necessarily equate that you wished you had changed it.”
“So, if, as an experiment, you say, ‘What do you think of the sound of …And Justice for All?’ Then there’s 5,000 different opinions about how the record sounds, and then you sit and go, ‘Do you regret this, or do you regret that?’ But you can’t have ‘The Black Album’, the way ‘The Black Album’ is and came to be, without the choices that were made on the ‘…And Justice for All’ album.
“You can’t have Death Magnetic and the choices that were made on that record without ‘St. Anger’. So, it’s all tethered together in a way that makes it a useless conversation at some point. Because everything is part of a bigger picture. And I guess I am very good at accepting the journey.”
“And then you have the other side of the coin, where a band like Metallica have tried to reinvent themselves, and the metal community can be one of the most conservative and reactionary you can possibly imagine.”
“So, when Metallica made their album with Lou Reed, the kickback on that was brutal. There’s a lot of that, ‘Well, just keep making ‘Master of Puppets’ over and over again. They still have that to this day. And that’s a shame,” Lars Ulrich said.