Lars Ulrich was asked by Andy Hall on how he crafts Metallica songs when working with James Hetfield, to which he replied (transcribed by UG):
“None of us ever went to school for any of this shit. We met in the fall of 1981 and instantly clicked.
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“And somehow, even at that time, we found a way to leave egos at the door when we were writing. It wasn’t like, ‘I’m the drummer and this is my turf and he’s the guitar player and that’s his turf!’
“There was this open kind of thing happening between the two of us and between our two respective instruments that led to what is probably a fairly unusual way of doing things but to a strong kind of approach.
“It’s hard to articulate and intellectualize even though we’ve been doing it for 35 years because I don’t really know what other people do.”
Lars also discussed the differences in the creative processes of “Master of Puppets” and “Hardwired,” saying:
“At that time [when we made ‘Master of Puppets’] – we were way less prolific. We basically wrote eight songs.
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“We’re sitting in this place right now where we wrote ‘Hardwired… to Self-Destruct.’ We started off with hundreds of ideas and narrowed it down to 20 or 30 what we thought were great ideas.
“And then the album came out with 10 songs on it. When we wrote ‘Master of Puppets’ we started off with 10 ideas that became six or seven songs.
“So it was almost that we were working our way up to an album’s worth of material rather than working our way down to an album’s worth of material that we do now.
“Because we’re way more prolific than we were back then. It’s a different time now and it was a different time then, not one’s better, not one’s worse. But when I think back to that time it was just like everything moved along so fast.”