The “corny” song that brought Metallica to superstardom
The idea of a band like Metallica becoming a household name felt almost impossible when they first started.
No heavy metal band since Black Sabbath had really been accepted by the mainstream, and even if they did, it’s not like what was coming out of the LA metal scene was anywhere close to the essence of what the genre was really about. But even when the thrash titans actually managed to score a few hits of their own, it’s not like they were completely in love with the idea of going “pop.”
Because, really, Metallica and pop don’t really belong in the same sentence. They are certainly popular by today’s standards, but if the closest that they’ve come to mainstream music was the Load series of albums, it’s not like they were itching to take up the same spaces that Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears were in around the same time. And yet, somehow they managed to fit right in.
They had made epics like ‘Master of Puppets’, but there was room for people that wanted to hear songs like ‘Fuel’ and ‘Sad But True’ instead of sitting through the massive musical exercises on albums like And Justice For All. If there was one person that the band could thank for turning them into one of the biggest names in music, though, it’s actually Bob Rock.
The production genius knew that there were opportunities for them to work on something bigger than what they had settled on before, and even if not every band member had the same ideas, Rock was the true mediator of the group half the time. He was the outside force that could get the sound they wanted whenever they walked into the studio, but when Jason Newsted first walked in, it wasn’t like everyone was thrilled with the more commercial material they had.
While it’s a struggle to call an epic like ‘Nothing Else Matters’ wasn’t necessarily “metal” in the traditional sense, Newsted felt that the tune was more than a little bit too silly for them to take on, saying, “I struggled with ‘Nothing Else Matters’; I knew it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up – it was undeniable – but I was kinda scared of it, to be honest, because I still wanted ‘CRUNCH!’ ‘Sandman’ I thought was kinda corny, honestly.”
But the reason why those songs tend to work is because they are so simple. Lars Ulrich had talked about the idea of writing songs that there were a bit more basic than having to shoo-in every single riff they could in a small timeframe, and when looking at how many people have resonated with a song like ‘Nothing Else Matters’, it’s not like they didn’t hit on something powerful there.
It’s not like they had necessarily sacrificed the heavy stuff, either. Like Newsted said, the sound of ‘Sad But True’ is absolutely crushing throughout the entire track, and while not every song is as heavy as they were in their prime in the 1980s, a track like ‘Through the Never’ wouldn’t have necessarily felt out of place on the albums before, either.
What James Hetfield was writing about was almost too personal for even him to take on, but that’s hardly a knock against the song itself. They were looking to make the best music that they could, and even if not every song ended up being a single, it was better for them to make the most out of a more skeletal approach to metal than relying on how many times they could show off their chops.
