Kirk Hammett accumulated a ton of supposedly great ideas for Metallica's 2016 album Hardwired To Self-Destruct, all of which he kept on his iPhone. An iPhone that he lost, never recovered, and never backed up to the Cloud. Hammett ultimately had no writing contributions to the album, but he's looking to make up for lost ground now.
In an interview with British GQ, Hammett says he's accumulated about 500 new ideas for another album. He still regrets losing the iPhone and hopes some of those ideas resurface as he writes new riffs for the next album. He doesn't explicitly state that he's not keeping the new ideas on an iPhone, but I can't imagine he'd make that same mistake twice.
I went through this whole thing a couple of years ago of losing my iPhone with five hundred ideas, and I still haven’t fully recovered from that. And my way of recovering from that is overcompensating… On that phone was five hundred ideas, and I have about five hundred ideas now at this point, plus. I’m sitting on a lot of really… what I feel is really, really great music that is just waiting to be developed.
Every day, I’m just picking up my guitar and then thinking about those lost ideas and then thinking, ‘I’ve gotta generate more ideas,’ in the hopes that maybe one or two of those old five hundred ideas that I lost might trickle through… Maybe it’ll find its way through, and I’ll go, ‘Oh, yeah! Eureka!’ It hasn’t happened yet. It hasn’t happened, though.
Metallica will release its remastered version of Master Of Puppets on November 10 though, where Hammett has writing credits on five of its eight songs.
