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The Horseman are coming, but you should at least try to fight back. Get on your horses and go. If you’ve got a magical sword, you may have a shot. Or, it’s the horsemen that have those demons swords and they are going to kill you and all of your fellow warriors.

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On their controversial self-titled album which came to be known as the Black Album, “Nothing Else Matters” was perhaps the greatest example of the new Metallica sound that alienated core fans. Frontman James Hetfield had been taking classical guitar lessons and wanted to show off his fingerpicking skills in the introduction. The song grew out of an extension of a phone call James made with his girlfriend while on tour and he was picking his guitar while on the phone.

While the song does get heavy during the second guitar solo, it is for the most part, a ballad about expressing your feelings, like an Emerson poem:

It was a song for myself in my room on tour when I was bumming out about being away from home. It’s quite amazing, it’s a true testament to honesty and exposing yourself, putting your real self out there, and taking the risk, taking a gamble that someone’s either going to step on your heart with spikes on or they’re going to put their heart right next to it, and you never know until you try. That solidified, I think, that we were doing the right thing, writing from the heart about what we felt, and you can’t go wrong that way.

“Nothing Else Matters” has become a song that any complete beginner who has never picked up a guitar can feel like they are playing Metallica for a few measures.

Famed Hollywood composer Michael Kamen contributed an orchestrated part, which was mixed somewhat low in the song. To compensate, years later Metallica did the S&M concert and album with Kamen conducting the San Francisco Symphony, with “Nothing Else Matters” being a centerpiece and single.

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Metallica doesn’t care what anyone else thinks of them and what other people are doing, which is why they alienated many of their hardcore fans by making a simpler, more commercial album. But they knew that this was the right move, and you can’t argue with the numbers.

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James Hetfield is claiming that this is the first time he is pouring his heart out in song to show his vulnerabilties. Although that is debateable

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There is a certain Metallica lifestyle, originally documented in the classic track “Motorbreath.”

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The man in the song is about to kill himself, he is done with life and death is what he prefers, and accepting death gives him a comforting feeling.

There is an therapeutic value in the song of just getting those thoughts out in the open and hearing how awful they are. Life is never truly empty and pointless; there is never truly nothing to live for.

Metallica received many letters from people who said this song stopped them from committing “the ultimate sin.”

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The first line of the George Benson 1977 classic “The Greatest Love of All.” (You may have heard Whitney Houston’s 1985 version.)

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Adam is having a cup of tea with his rolled cigarette, not with one of these:
Fruit roll-ups

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If everyone were to do onto others, then eventually we’d all do horrible things to each other and that would be that, the world would be even more corrupt and people would kill eachother and rob everyone. It turns out that Metallica is an anti-war band. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoVavpbhBfM

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