The classic Metallica song inspired by Peter Pan
In a music world known for its pretty boys, Metallica might as well have been the polar opposite of the mainstream. As the hair metal movement started garnering significant attention on The Sunset Strip, the thrash legends made some of the heaviest music imaginable across albums like Master of Puppets and And Justice For All. While they had already started playing in big arenas without a single song on the radio, they knew they needed another element to their sound to become truly massive.
Looking to pair down their sound to something much simpler, the band settled on Bob Rock as the producer for their next record, having worked his magic on records by hair metal bands such as Mötley Crüe and the later period of Aerosmith. Though Rock may have qualified for the job, James Hetfield also wanted to expand his lyrical palette.
Known for writing dark songs about war for most of their career, Hetfield got the beginning of the song ‘Enter Sandman‘ from the fairy tale of Peter Pan. When he first presented the riff to the band, the lyrics were much darker, dealing with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which Rock thought was too horrifying to be put on the charts.
After some constructive criticism over the lyrics, Hetfield took the track in a different direction, centred around the idea of having nightmares. Tying the rest of the song together, Hetfield’s descent into a nightmare scenario for children caps off with the phrase “We’re off to Never Never Land”, which is a direct quote from the fairytale land that Peter Pan flies to in the fabled children’s story.
Though the nightmare scenario may have been the crux of it, Hetfield also liked the idea of manipulation playing into the song, telling Uncut: “I wanted more of the mental thing where this kid gets manipulated by what adults say. And you know when you wake up with that shit in your eye? That’s supposedly been put in there by the sandman to make you dream. So the guy in the song tells this little kid that, and he freaks. He can’t sleep after that, and it works the opposite way. Instead of a soothing thing, the table’s turned.”
Although the band pumped out their version of the tune, it took a long time before they came to it as the first single on the record. As Rock recalled in the Classic Albums series, “Lars {Ulrich} knew just from the demos that ‘Sandman’ was the song. I didn’t really hear it.” After toying with releasing ‘Holier Than Thou’ as the first single, the opening riff sucked in a whole new strip of Metallica fans, appreciating the focus on hard rock rather than straight-ahead metal.
The Peter Pan reference would also become a recurring element of the band’s sound, used again in the first single of their following album, Load. Kicking off with ‘King Nothing’, the follow-up is similar to their mainstream breakthrough, as Hetfield repeats the phrase about being off to Never Never Land in the song’s outro.
For all of the change in the air during this era of Metallica, the band still knew how to write songs that could send a chill down the listener’s spine.
