So What!'s Steffan Chirazi catches up with Robert Trujillo on a summer August day.
                    

                        I sit in a packed plane on the second leg of my flight from San Francisco to Santiago, Chile, where, in a few days, Metallica will play a show outside the US for the first time since August 25, 2019, in Mannheim, Germany.
                    

                        Where to start…well, once upon a time, 40 years ago, a young Danish guy and a young Downey dude found each other through an ad in some free paper…and here we are. Four decades later, in 2021.
                    

                        The zoom flickers to life, and there he is, Jason Newsted, as ebullient, energetic, and friendly as ever.
                    

                        Lars is used to being the chief navigator. He is used to knowing the exact speed and coordinates at which Metallica is traveling, yet for the last 12 months, such things were often impossible to get ahead of. I wondered how all of this would affect Lars, and the fact is, he has weathered the turbulence with relative calm, carving out some continuity amidst those waves of the unknown.