The Metallica lyrics Lars Ulrich insisted on changing: “Doesn’t fit the mood of the music”
Nothing about metal music is necessarily supposed to be tame and family-friendly. Most people looking to get fans to bang their heads are more than happy to make songs that will scare someone to death, and no matter how many times they try to put a new twist on it, there are always going to be a select few listeners much too scared to even try to listen for what acts like Slayer are really singing about. While Metallica have turned themselves into the poster children of metal ambassadors, Lars Ulrich admitted that working on the lyrics to ‘Enter Sandman’ meant fixing some of James Hetfield’s original drafts.
But if you look at what Metallica looked like just two years before The Black Album, they seem like the last band that would take metal to the mainstream. That was reserved for the hair metal bands of the world, and even the thrash icons had to share screentime on MTV with the likes of Poison and Bon Jovi, they weren’t going to be caught dead listening to their music.
By the end of the tour for And Justice for All, they did at least begin to listen to what everyone else was listening to. The step of including producer Bob Rock in the writing process for their new record was bound to give them an extra boost, but ‘Enter Sandman’ became the song that couldn’t fail once Kirk Hammett presented them with the initial guitar riff.
After Ulrich flipped the lick around to give it its standard structure, it was all down to Hetfield to write the lyrics. He had been the group’s mouthpiece for so long, and after getting more intimate on ‘Nothing Else Matters’ and ‘The Unforgiven’, ‘Enter Sandman’ was his way of getting darker with a tale ripped straight out of a horror movie.
If everything else were all light and friendly by comparison, what’s the darkest place you can go from there? Why not infanticide? Yes, you read that right. Although Hetfield eventually changed them, the initial draft for the song was based around a family that gets shaken up when they find their baby dead when waking up in the morning.
While ‘One’ had gone down easy with MTV despite its graphic tale of war, Ulrich thought this was one step too far, saying, “In the spring of 1991 [James] came in with these lyrics about crib death – the line ‘Off to never never land’ was originally ‘Disrupt the perfect family’. Nice, friendly, feel-good lyrics! We sat down and said, ‘No disrespect, you’ve written great lyrics over the years, but maybe the subject matter and the vibe in these doesn’t fit the mood of the music.’”
Then again, Ulrich was probably much more business-minded about the decision than anything else. There had been dark Metallica songs before, but knowing that this had the potential to become their glorified anthem, having to be known as “that band with the baby killer song” wasn’t really how anyone wanted to have their same set in stone.
Despite Ulrich not knowing who ‘The Sandman’ was in the context of Hetfield’s new lyrics, it hardly mattered. Metallica were now on their way to conquering the world, and in just a few subtle changes, they had the kind of lyrics that would tattooed on the memories of every metal fan born after 1991.
