Metallica began working with producer Greg Fidelman in 2008 on their record Death Magnetic. Metallica and Fidelman would follow that up with the oft-maligned Lou Reed collaboration Lulu in 2011, which still draws very divisive opinions to this day. Though Fidelman credits the Lulu sessions for giving us arguably one of the best modern Metallica tracks, "Hardwired" from Hardwired… to Self-Destruct.
In an interview with The Metallica Report, Fidelman said he and Metallica built trust in one another throughout the Lulu sessions. That trust culminated in the song "Hardwired", which Lars Ulrich noted in an interview with The Howard Stern Show was written and recorded in roughly one week – hardly the usual timeframe Metallica takes to write a song.
"The Lou Reed project installed some confidence in them towards me, that for sure happened," said Fidelman. "I don't know that the Hardwired project would have happened the way it did if they didn't have that confidence that they built during the Lulu record.
"So, as we get towards the end of the Hardwired thing, we're gonna record [the title track]. Their confidence in me solidified, well before that probably. 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. What else is there?' As far as they're concerned, what else is there? So, it definitely helped."
