I’ve learned that there’s a signature Metallica sound, and if we stray too far from that, our fans get impatient, or they just don’t understand, or they miss the point. And I’m not saying that’s...

I’ve been into horror movies ever since I was five years old.

For me, one of the most perfect times to watch a horror movie is when it’s cold and raining outside and there’s pretty much no outdoor activity to be done. It kind of sets the...

When I got my first Marshall amp, it was so empowering. No one ever forgets their first Marshall amp if you’re a guitar player pursuing a big powerful sound. I mean, no one ever forgets...

For a while I was collecting Satan and devil stuff – you know, anything that had to do with old Beelzebub or Lucifer. But I had to put the brakes on it, because there’s a...

I’ve always loved horror, I’ve always loved collecting, I’ve always loved weird and macabre things, and I’ve always loved conventions. So what could be better than having your own Fear FestEviL where all those great...

On ‘Metallica,’ I recorded six or seven different guitar solos for almost every song, took the best aspects of each solo, mapped out a master solo and made a composite. Then I learned how to...

The movie ‘Black Cat,’ from 1934, is one of my favorite movies.

Deep Purple definitely belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. ‘Cause they had great songs, great musicianship, they had an impact, and they’re a huge influence on the heavy metal community as a...

My musical tastes change every week.

If a guitar is too easy for me to play, it makes me too laid back. I like to battle with my guitar.

If I had unlimited funds, wall space and storage, I would collect a lot more things, like ‘Planet of the Apes,’ ‘Star Wars,’ science fiction stuff, autographs, and prop guns and weapons. I have to...

Horror movies started to wane around the onset of World War II, and after World War II, when all the troops came home, people weren’t really interested in seeing horror movies, because they had the...

Ampeg made incredible guitar heads in the early Nineties and then stopped. And I don’t know why. The one we used had a nice clean, warm sound, and it blended well with the other amps...

Metallica is a very complicated, fragile thing. On the outside, it’s all metal, but on the inside it’s very delicate.

I think it goes without saying that a lot of big horror fans are just nerds and geeks.

When people are confronted with something they’ve never seen before, they really don’t know how to react.

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that young players – I mean and 12-year-olds – really like my guitar style. There’s something in my guitar style that they totally can latch onto and...

There’s something about a wah pedal that really gets my gut going! People will probably say, ‘He’s just hiding behind the wah.’ But that isn’t the case. It’s just that those frequencies really bring out...

Getting sequestered and not really knowing what to do with your time and then discovering, ‘Oh, I can watch a bunch of horror movies’ has probably played out in a lot of people’s discovery of...

A lot of the main characters in horror movies are outsiders as well, so that outsider syndrome reverberates within horror fans and geeky collectors. It’s kind of a rallying call that brings fans and collectors...

It really shocked me just to hear of the fans’ response to ‘St. Anger’ not having guitar solos.

Metallica is like the phoenix rising from the ashes. We set everything on fire, and this is what has risen from it – ‘St. Anger’ being the fire and ‘Death Magnetic’ being the phoenix.

Technology has given us convenience, but at the same time it’s making musicians work harder in that if you really want to make money making music and selling albums, you have to go out there...

When I see my kids totally into their Legos, it brings me back to the days I was hanging out and playing with my monster models. It brings me there in a second.

I’ve always been attracted to the darker things in life. I was never one to go for light, airy stuff, even as a child. My whole aesthetic has always been one of the darker side....

Everyone has a side to them that’s kind of unexplained and feels misunderstood.

I was really, really wild in my early twenties and a bit self-destructive.

Guitar playing is both extremely easy for me and extremely difficult for me at the same time.

The only problem I’ve had with my Vox wah is its tendency to move around on the floor. So now it sits on a rubber mat that says in big letters, ‘Kirk’s Wah-Wah Rug.’

A good horror movie should have peaks and valleys, a good horror movie should move you emotionally; a good horror movie should be exciting to watch and energizing in a weird kind of way.

The concept of clearing one’s mind before performing a task so that it is consumed by nothing but that task, yet is open at the same time to anything that might happen – that concept...

My guitars are my umbilical cord. They’re directly wired into my head.

I went through a whole blues period in the Nineties, and that had some influence on ‘Load’ and ‘ReLoad.’

I fix things all the time. Every time I do a solo, I re-check it and correct things that don’t hit the mark.

It’s definitely true that Stevie Ray Vaughan is one of my all-time favorite guitarists.

For the ‘Load’ album, I was experimenting so much with tone that I had to keep journals on what equipment I was using. For ‘Hero of the Day,’ I know I used a 1958 Les...

The same sensations that you get in heavy metal are in horror movies. Heavy metal sounds evil and horror movies are evil, ha ha!

Jeff Beck is one of my heroes and has been since I first picked up a guitar.

One of my favorite horror films of the Nineties was ‘Event Horizon.’

I didn’t want to fall into the trap of competing with all these other great guitar players. I just want to sidestep the whole thing and get out of the race.

I feel like I’ve matured more musically than I have personally. But I totally embrace what becoming older has to offer. I find the wisdom that comes with each passing year is a trip.

Guitar players in the nineties seem to be reacting against the technique oriented eighties.

Just because you know umpteen billion scales, it doesn’t mean you have to use them all in a solo.

We wanted to offer something new to our audience. I hate it when bands stop taking chances.

Although I’m a lead guitarist, I’d say that a good 95 percent of my time onstage is spent playing rhythm.

After months of playing air guitar to ‘Free Bird’, what really got me into guitar was watching a documentary about Jimi Hendrix and picking up the Woodstock soundtrack. Listening to his version of ‘Star Spangled...

I love this pedal to death. The only way you could keep me from playing one is by chopping off my legs!

I don’t think success has changed us as people at all. We are the same lunatics that we were when this band first got going. We never see ourselves as being on a higher level...

Much of my playing is rhythmic and choppy; I use a lot of double stops. The wah just accents all those stops and chops and brings out the rhythmic aspect that much more.