The one Metallica song that left James Hetfield absolutely terrified
When Metallica went to make The Black Album, they desperately needed a change. Though And Justice For All had been one of the biggest successes of their career, the production job was far from perfect, and the elongated run lengths of the songs left the group wondering what they were supposed to be doing in the first place. They needed a change in direction, and producer Bob Rock was the guy who would shake James Hetfield’s usual approach to metal songs.
Suggesting that they hadn’t captured what they do onstage on a record yet, Metallica went into the studio with Rock to create songs that were much simpler, focusing on a handful of riffs that they could play for hours on end. Although ‘Enter Sandman’ became the first breakout single for the project, James Hetfield came up with one of the central ballads of the record purely by accident.
When talking on the phone with his girlfriend, Hetfield started to pluck out the opening notes of what became ‘Nothing Else Matters’, consisting of all open strings on a guitar. After fleshing the song out by himself, he composed one of his best lyrics, written about life on the road and missing his wife back home.
While Hetfield loved writing the song, he had never anticipated it being a Metallica song, thinking he was just writing for him. Once the rest of the band got ahold of it, though, Hetfield was horrified, telling Classic Albums, “I think it was Lars [Ulrich] who said ‘Hey that’s good’ and then I was like ‘Uh-oh, now what do I do?’”.
After adding different extensions to it in the studio, Rock thought that the song needed to be taken one step further, bringing in composer Michael Kamen to compose an orchestral score. While Kamen had planned to play the main melody, he mentioned wanting to make something different for the final product, saying, “I could just follow the tune. But orchestras don’t like playing that stuff. It’s not interesting to them, so I made up lines”.
When Metallica heard the track with the lush sounds of strings in the end, Hetfield was horrified again, explaining, “Once we heard it, it was like ‘What have we done?’”. Since Metallica was known for their thrash metal roots, the band tried their best to bury it, as Ulrich remembers, “We were mixing the record, and I distinctly remember the sound of the orchestra being turned down lower and lower in the mix”.
Once The Black Album arrived at fans’ doorsteps, thrash purists were betrayed to see their favourite metal act suddenly make a song with an orchestra. Though there might have been some hurt feelings, the song became one of Metallica’s biggest hits, awarding them a whole new fanbase that identified with Hetfield’s lyrics.
What made ‘Nothing Else Matters’ so confronting for Hetfield was not just its softness, but its honesty. Up until that point, Metallica’s identity had been built on distance, aggression, and abstraction, with lyrics that spoke in collective terms rather than personal confession. This song stripped all of that away, leaving no mythology to hide behind. For a band forged in thrash’s armour, vulnerability felt far more dangerous than distortion.
In hindsight, that risk is precisely why the song has endured. By allowing a private moment to sit alongside the band’s heaviest material, Metallica unknowingly expanded the emotional scope of metal itself. ‘Nothing Else Matters’ didn’t dilute their power, it reframed it, proving that intensity could come from restraint just as easily as volume. What once felt like a mistake has since become one of the defining statements of their career.
The band eventually came around to the orchestra being in the mix too, eventually calling Michael Kamen again to conduct an orchestra for a Metallica concert, turning the mix of thrash and classical music into the album S&M. Looking back on the recording now, Hetfield looked at it as one of the great triumphs of his lyrical career as well, remarking, “You can’t go wrong when you start talking about your feelings”.
