“I don’t know that the ‘Hardwired’ project would have happened the way it did if they didn’t have that confidence.”

Metallica producer Greg Fidelman reflected on recording “Lulu”, and noted how the process made Lars Ulrich & Co. trust him as a producer, which paid off in the long run.”Lulu” has been much maligned over the years, with with fans placing the (in)famous Lou Reed collaboration as one of Metallica’s weakest albums to date alongside 2003’s “St. Anger”.

“Those are really divisive albums, and you have two camps — people who like it and people who don’t”, Kirk Hammett admitted a while back, but argued that it’s “important” to have such albums in one’s back catalog.

In several ways, Kirk was right. Aside from the claim that the highs wouldn’t feel as high without the lows, there’s also the fact that “Lulu” was when Metallica began their long and fruitful collaboration with Greg Fidelman as the producer (Fidelman previously engineered the Rick Rubin-produced “Death Magnetic”).

During a recent appearance on The Metallica Report podcast, Fidelman also argued that recording “Lulu” also paved the way for “Hardwired… to Self-Destruct” (transcribed by Ultimate Guitar):

“The Lou Reed project installed some confidence in them towards me, that for sure happened. I don’t know that the ‘Hardwired’ project would have happened the way it did if they didn’t have that confidence.”


Reflecting on how effortless the process of recording the title track was, Fidelman added:

“So, as we get towards the end of the ‘Hardwired’ thing, we’re gonna record that song. Their confidence in me solidified… We don’t even need to talk about it anymore. That’s, I suppose, the key to the confidence thing — there’s a lot of conversations you don’t need to have, because there’s not a lot of questions, right? You just know. ‘Yeah, Greg thinks we could do this. I think we could do this. Let me see what else is there?’ So, it definitely helped.”

One part of recording “Lulu” was finding the balance between Lou’s and Metallica’s desires, Fidelman also explained, noting how it was “a new experience for everybody”:

“I knew what the way out is, and we’re gonna get through. And, hey, if Lou Reed says it’s perfect, and we don’t think it’s perfect, then either we are not understanding something he likes, or he’s not understanding something we don’t like. But no matter which one of those things is [the case], that’s a conversation we can have tomorrow. He thinks it’s great? Hey, look, if we want to change it, we can change it tomorrow. To get get into it right now, that’s not going to be helpful for anybody at all, especially in the big picture.”