Christina Fuoco-Karasinski of LiveDaily recently conducted an interview with METALLICA bassist Robert Trujillo. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

LiveDaily: How have you seen the band grow since you joined METALLICA almost six years ago?

Trujillo: In a lot of ways: For starters, me, personally and Kirk [Hammett, guitar], we've now got children. When I first joined METALLICA back in 2003, I wasn't married, I didn't have kids. Now I'm sitting here with a 2-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son, happily married. That's a major transition in one's life. When I first joined the band, I was kind of like the boy in the bubble. I really had to focus on being a part of this band and learning over 23 years of catalog at the time, then learning all the "St. Anger" material, which was really crazy. So I had to create this bubble environment, so I could only focus on that. That would have been difficult with the full-on family back then. And then also Kirk, as I mentioned, has a couple kids as well. Lars [Ulrich, drums] had a child just over a year ago. There's a lot of new magic in the band, somewhere we can all connect, where we share the same interests. Outside of a lot of things like family, we don't have a lot of the same interests. We're all different. Our families sort of bring us together. The music brings us together, definitely. It's nice to have the family aspect in there too, something we obviously love and cherish. We can all share that.

LiveDaily: What do you see for the future of METALLICA? You have one more album left on your deal with Warner Bros., correct?

Trujillo: Basically, I don't know the technical details. I can only tell you this: outside of the business side of things — which is probably what you're asking me — on a creative level, the sky's the limit. To me, "Death Magnetic" is only a launch pad. We're already jamming on new ideas and new riffs. There's a rhythm-section thing that I'm feeling with Lars that I'd like to dive into even more so with the future. It's great to be playing thrashy, heavy riffs again, too. That's one of the things with this band — there's no shortage of musical ideas. When you check out some of the other bands that have been around for so many years, sometimes the hardest thing is to stay motivated. Sometimes bands will end up playing almost like — how do you say it? — a tribute scenario where they're playing all the hits all the time. That's cool. But the future of [that type of] band doesn't seem as interesting. I think we still got it in us to create interesting music and to get even better with it. That's kind of fun.

Read the entire interview on www.livedaily.com.