Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [173]
It was also, Lars confessed, ‘us getting pretty bored with the direction of the last three albums. They were all different from each other, but they were all going in the same direction. You know, long songs, longer songs, even longer songs…It was time to take a sharp turn. The only way to do that would be to write one long song to fill the whole album or write songs that were shorter than we had done before. And that’s what we did. I don’t need to tell you again how I feel about being pigeonholed with the whole thrash metal thing. But the new shit’s just got a whole new vibe and feel that I never knew Metallica were capable of.’ The key was to begin by making sure the songs stayed focused. Consigned to the bin were numbers that lasted nine and ten minutes and went through several ‘movements’: ‘I used to think it was cool, a sign of our fuck-you attitude to being commercial. Now I realise it was just basically because we couldn’t play. It wasn’t until we started with Bob that we really learned how to nail a riff or a rhythm or whatever. It’s actually a lot harder to do but you don’t know that until you finally try.’
Lars, in particular, would discover just hard that was when Bob insisted he simply wasn’t up to the job and should take lessons in order to bring him up to speed. A room at the studio was set aside for Lars to spend several hours a day ‘practising’, upon which James pinned a handwritten sign: ‘LARS’ CLOSET’. Getting the drums ‘right’ would, in fact, set the project back several weeks. In the meantime, Bob worked with James on getting the best of the near two-dozen songs he had written with Lars – and occasionally Kirk (as with Justice, Newsted would achieve only one co-songwriting credit on the album) – into what the taskmaster producer considered recordable shape. Initially, this proved almost as arduous as coaxing a decent drum track out of Lars. For the first time in his life James, who had never been told his lyrics were not good enough, found himself rewriting verses, sharpening up choruses. In particular, Rock worked hard on getting it into the singer’s head that it was easier – and better – to use one word where previously he’d been used to using several. Single words could be broken down into syllables that sufficed for entire lines in a song, as with the chorus of one of the potential singles, ‘Enter Sandman’, on which Hetfield’s original lines were broken down into single words, using the syllables to stretch and tease the melody out of them. En…ter…night…/Ex…it…light…
James also came armed with something he never had before: an actual from-the-heart love song. Written while on the road and missing Kristen, the key line ‘Never opened myself this way’ summing up a musical moment unlike any one might have expected from Hetfield or Metallica, even as they strived for a hit. Suddenly, it seemed, Everyteen had turned into Everyman.
Speaking of it nearly twenty years later, James admitted that at first he ‘didn’t even want to play it for the guys. It was so heartfelt, so personal to me. I thought that Metallica could only be these songs about destroying things, headbanging, bleeding for the crowd…I certainly did not think it was a Metallica song. When the guys heard it they were amazed at how much they, I guess, related to it. It turned out to be a pretty big song on that record [that] touched a lot of people.’ It was also, he reflected in another interview around the same time, more than the usual confessional power ballad. It was ‘about a connection with your higher power, lots of different things’. He recalled being invited to a Hell’s Angels Clubhouse in New York where ‘they showed me a film that they’d put together of one of the fallen brothers