The Anti-Eno?

Interesting article in the Sunday New York Times on Metallica and how they seem to have evolved from the band documented in Some Kind of Monster. If the new record is accepted as a bona fide return to their glory days instead of grasping at their own ghosts, producer Rick Rubin will likely be the reason why. I was struck by this passage, in particular:

He wanted the band members “to try to erase many years of thinking about either needing to change their sound, or evolve,” he said. “If your marching orders for the first 20 years have been ‘change, change, change,’ then letting go of those preconceived ideas is in its own way a new idea.”

As Mr. Ulrich explained it: “Rick put this mantra over our heads, which was: don’t be afraid of your past. You don’t have to copy it, but it’s O.K. to be inspired by it.”

I like this because it's so diametrically opposed to what Brian Eno was said to have done for U2's Achtung Baby, where he was given free rein to erase anything the band recorded that sounded "too much like U2." And it's an interesting window into what a good producer does to coax the right things out of a band at a particular juncture in their career.