Ex-Metallica bassist Jason Newsted working on two new “heavy” projects

Metallica‘s former bassist Jason Newsted has said he is working on two new “heavy” projects.

Newsted has been working with his bluegrass project, Jason Newsted and the Chophouse Band, for several decades, and had recently started to incorporate more metal influences into the band.

Now, however, he is firmly “stepping back into the heavy”, as he explained in an interview with Gator 98.7FM.  “So the last couple of weeks I’ve been auditioning guitar players for a heavy project. I’m back on bass and singing with a metal drummer — double bass — you know, getting loud again. So I’ve got a couple of irons in the fire. I’m putting two new projects together right now — but loud.” [via Consequence of Sound]

In addition to the new projects, Newsted said he had been working on the first Chophouse Band album. “I spent six months of last year putting together The Chophouse Band Volume 1,” he said. “The Chophouse Band has been together making music since 1992. So it was our first album after 30 years. I spent a lot of time on that. And then, once I got that under my belt, I’m kind of stepping back into the heavy now.”

He had previously said that the new Chophouse Band album goes “places that are as heavy as anything else that I’d been involved with — Voivod, Ozzy, Metallica, Newsted band, any of that stuff.”

He added: “I can actually really concentrate on playing the guitar and then singing that background stuff. And there’s screaming and some [growling] also. So I still haven’t lost that. And it lets people know that there’s still one foot in that place. You can take the boy out of the metal [but] you can’t take the metal out of the boy; it’s just the way it’s always gonna be.”

Newsted was a member of Metallica from 1986-2001, playing bass on their albums ‘… And Justice For All’ (1988), ‘Metallica’ (1991), ‘Load’ (1996) and ‘Reload” (1997). He later departed to focus on other projects.

His former bandmates joked today that they couldn’t “believe” they weren’t Rihanna’s backing singers at her Super Bowl Halftime show after posting a clip of themselves singing ‘Diamonds’ on Carpool Karaoke.