Metallica’s Kirk Hammett has recently opened up on his formative years at home, on an episode of Backstaged: The Devil in Metal Podcast.
As per Ultimate Guitar, Hammett’s recent interview links back to a previous one from 2001, where Hammett spoke on his relationship with his abusive father. He said, “I was abused as a child. My dad drank a lot. He beat the shit out of me and my mom quite a bit. I got ahold of a guitar, and from the time I was 15, I rarely left my room.”
“I had a bad childhood. I experienced a lot of darkness early on in my life that I probably shouldn’t have been exposed to,” Hammett has added.
“Unfortunate things happened to me as a child. And so that real-life darkness came to me way too early in my life. Basically, guitar playing and music saved my life. And it was a type of therapy for me. It made me feel better when I knew that I wasn’t feeling great.”
“And I was so young. I didn’t understand why I was feeling this way. And I didn’t know this was because of circumstances and situations. I didn’t put that together.”
Hammett elaborated on guitar was a saving grace for him and how that for predominantly most of his life, this has been the case.
He said, “I just knew that guitar playing helped me feel better and calmed me down as an adolescent, as a teenager, as an adult, up to like now. I mean, I have a lot of anxiety and I’m prone to depression-like most people. My guitar helps me through all that.”
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“A good heavy metal song is like a good horror movie. It’s intense, it’s unpredictable. It has a lot of the same feelings, of the darker things in life…”
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