When I first slapped that headline onto this article, I felt like 50 wasn't a ton of shows, but realistically that's a little less than one seventh of the year entire. So it's not a ton, but it's a lot more than it initially seemed.
Anyway, that's how many shows Metallica is planning on doing this year. James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett told The Nerdist podcast that they think they can pretty comfortably handle 50 shows per year, but doing much more really cuts into their lives. Which not only makes sense, but Metallica have kind of earned the right to relax at this point.
James: “We’ve got stuff penciled in for the whole year. My body has told me to tell these guys that fifty shows a year is kind of what we can do, so make the best of those. And I think we all kind of agree in that. But fifty shows a year, that’s pretty good. My body can handle that. Body, mind and spirit all need to kind of revitalize themselves at home, and days off for voices — things like that — so fifty shows a year, it goes pretty quick, I’m sure. I tell people, ‘We’re only doing fifty a year,’ and they’re saying, ‘Oh my God! That’s a lot.’ And it’s, like, it’s not. It’s not, really, compared to what we used to do.”
Kirk: “Yeah, I mean, we would tour for ten out of twelve months in the past. We had crazy tours where we would tour, like, twelve, fifteen, sixteen weeks in a row, doing five shows a week…”
James: “And we came home, and we were divorced, girlfriends were gone, and we were addicted to a few substances, and we were fighting.”
Kirk: “It’s all a learning experience. We learned so much through all that.”
So could this be the eventual winding down of Metallica starting? Or maybe just the dawn of a "new material" focused Metallica?
