Producer Rick Rubin Talks New Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers Album

According to long time album producer Rick Rubin, the Metallica guys are about to begin writing songs to include on a new album. Rubin has already been tapped to produce the record, and recently talked to Billboard.com about the process.

“I had a meeting with Lars [Ulrich] in San Francisco...to explore what the focus was going to be this time around,” he said. “I’m still sort of thinking about what that is going to be. I’ll ask a lot of questions and we’ll probably listen to some of the riffs that they’ve been writing. Usually I’ll hear something that will sort of indicate the direction and then we’ll talk about it from there.”

Of course, that’s far from the only project Rubin is working on. He’s also produced the latest Red Hot Chili Peppers album, I’m With You, which is due out August 30. Rubin shared his thoughts on the band’s new guitarist Josh Klinghoffer.

“Josh is fantastic,” Rubin said. “He played with John Frusciante for many, many years and he actually toured with the Chili Peppers before, so he’s sort of part of the extended family. He’s stylistically very close to John but has a completely different trip. It sounds like the Red Hot Chili Peppers that you’ve never heard before.”

The producer said that this album won’t be a double album, like its 2006 predecessor, Stadium Arcadium.

“It was painful not to share all of the material that we had, but we felt it would be too much,” he said. “We really wanted it to be 12 songs but it ended up being 14 just because nobody could agree on which 12.”

Full story from gibson.com