Kirk Hammett was born on November 18, 1962, in San Francisco, California. As Metallica’s lead guitarist, he contributed riffs as well as solos, including the central guitar figure in “Enter Sandman” from 1991’s Metallica. That song grew from an idea he brought in and an arrangement the band worked through together.
Hammett was already writing original music before he joined Metallica. He co-founded Exodus in 1979, building songs from riffs that he brought to the other musicians. When he moved into Metallica in April 1983, the band was preparing to record its debut, Kill ’Em All. There was little time to settle in. Recalling the sessions in an interview published by Guitar World in 2009, Hammett said he had roughly four or five days to record his leads. He would make a few attempts at a solo, get a usable take and move on.
Lessons with Joe Satriani continued as Metallica wrote their second album, Ride the Lightning, released in 1984. In a 2014 Guitar World interview about those sessions, Hammett recalled cycling about 25 miles each way to study because he didn’t have a car. Satriani helped him connect scales to chord changes, select notes for particular effects and reduce unnecessary finger movement. The point was to make deliberate choices within a solo, with a clearer understanding of why a phrase worked over the music underneath it.
His Exodus material also found a place on the record. Metallica listened to his old band’s demo alongside his riff tapes, and the middle-section riff in “Creeping Death” came from music he had written as a teenager. Joining another band hadn’t meant leaving all of his earlier work behind.
“Enter Sandman” developed through another exchange of ideas. Hammett told Guitar World in 2021 that listening to Soundgarden’s Louder Than Love had helped spark the riff. His original version reached its closing chords after each phrase. Lars Ulrich suggested repeating the opening figure three times before those chords arrived, changing the pattern’s momentum. Hammett’s description of Metallica’s writing process put that small adjustment in context: “The more we tweak it, the more it sounds like Metallica.” His contribution supplied the starting point; working on its shape together gave the song its finished form.
Film offered another reason to compose. In 2017, Hammett wanted background music for an exhibition of his horror collection at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. He wrote “Maiden and the Monster” for that setting, then recognized that he could develop more pieces around imagined film scenes. The idea expanded into Portals, his first solo release: a four-track instrumental EP issued on April 23, 2022. Hammett produced it, with Edwin Outwater co-writing “High Plains Drifter” and “The Incantation,” playing keyboards and directing orchestral musicians.
“High Plains Drifter” gave an unused idea a home. In his 2022 track commentary for Apple Music, Hammett explained that it began on flamenco guitar and hadn’t fit into Metallica’s music. He kept working with it, and Outwater understood the direction when Hammett played it for him. The finished piece evoked the unsettling Western atmosphere Hammett associated with the film of the same name. A composition that hadn’t suited his band became part of a release built around his own musical and cinematic interests.
