Hetfield On The Fate Of The ‘Presidio’ Recordings

Metallica frontman James Hetfield gave a short phone interview to Scoop of the Columbus, Ohio radio station The Blitz 99.7 FM Wednesday (February 25). Asked to comment on the recent reports that some of the material written and recorded in 2001 shortly before he went into rehab might end up on an upcoming soundtrack, James said, “We don’t know about that soundtrack thing just yet. But there are quite a few songs that didn’t make it onto ‘St. Anger’ that… Presidio [a rented barrack at the San Francisco army base] was a place that we were recording in in San Francisco before the Headquarters was built and before I went into rehab. So there was probably… I don’t know… 15 songs or something that didn’t quite make it onto ‘St. Anger’ — maybe more. And those things. We’ve got ’em. They’re cool — they’re not finished, but they’ll appear sometime somewhere, there’ll be a right time for those. But for us, ‘St. Anger’ is doing really pretty darn good, and it’s hard to not keep writing, so it would be tough to go back and redo some of that stuff or get it in the shape to put it out. That would remind me of, like, ‘Load’ and ‘Re-Load’ — working backwards. But there’s just so much good vibe going on now, there’s no use in kind of turning around. So those things will appear in their form some way or another.”