Report: Jason Newsted Announce His Return To Metallica…

It’s been over 10 years since Jason Newsted’s been in Metallica, but since he was with the band during their peak popularity, his exit from the band (coincidentally right before Metallica made their undisputed worst album) is still a topic of interest to many metalheads.

Newsted was interviewed by Scuzz TV in the UK and was asked about his exit. I guess enough time has passed where he felt he could finally open up fully about it. We knew previously that he quit because the rest of Metallica wanted Newsted to focus on Metallica and did not want him doing side projects, namely Echobrain project that he was working on.

Now, Newsted elaborates that what actually happened was Metallica’s management at Q-Prime heard the Echobrain demos and were very impressed. They wanted to represent the band and push it using Newsted’s built-in credibility of being in Metallica. Newsted alleges that once James Hetfield heard about this, he supposedly got jealous of management’s interest, and assumed Echobrain’s success would hurt Metallica. So, James “put the kibosh” on the entire thing, and the next day the management company called Newsted and told him they were no longer interested.