It couldn't have happened the other way… 'Nothing Else Matters' is delicate. "My point being, the softest song that METALLICA ever made - ever - broke down the most serious walls ever to be able to take 'Creeping Death' and everything else through to the people. It's gonna be 'Fight Fire' and 'Battery'. Guess what's gonna happen for the other two hours and 20 minutes, man. Have them come over and play for our kids.' So, all of a sudden, all these people come out of the woodwork, 'Can you come and play 'Nothing Else Matters' for us?' 'Absolutely.' And that's six minutes out of two and a half hours. But all of a sudden, there's this nice song: 'These guys are great. 1 in 30 countries this week.' And we were looking around, like, 'What the fuck? What?' So there were people that were calling, representatives from promoters and radio stations and all this stuff from countries we haven't played yet, that we haven't been in live. We had played 27 or 32 countries at that point… So, all of a sudden, when 'Nothing Else Matters' comes out, the guy comes in the dressing room that tells us what's happening for the day, and he said, ' 'Nothing Else Matters' is No. " ' Sandman' was the first single, and then 'Nothing Else Matters' showed up some months later, once we were already out on the tour for some months.
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"We were out on tour for a couple of months," Jason recalled. Newsted also reflected on the massive commercial success of "Nothing Else Matters", which Hetfield had written about missing his then-girlfriend while on tour. If we keep our standard up here and we play to that standard, mostly everybody's gonna like it. So when I first heard it, I was, like, 'Are we sure that we wanna share that with the world? Isn't that your song for your girl?' And everybody was going, 'That's a pretty fucking good song.' Usually if we like it that much, a lot of other people are gonna like it. And that song was so personal about him and his special person. Some of them are quite personal - 'The God That Failed' 'Fade To Black' very personal, one of the best lyricists there's ever been in any style of music ever, this guy.
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The one catch, I think, that I would say here is that 'Nothing Else Matters' was such a personal song for James. So we still had the repertoire to be able to do all that all the time - with 'Battery' and 'Fight Fire ' and anything you wanted - along with the softer songs. And live was all that mattered to me anyway. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "I had no problem with coming back to the midtempo crushing as opposed to the fast stuff, 'cause we've still got plenty of stuff fast to play live. While promoting the the 30th-anniversary reissue of METALLICA's self-titled fifth LP, better known as The Black Album, the band's former bassist Jason Newsted spoke to Germany's Rock Antenne about the record's more streamlined direction compared to the thrash metal overtones of METALLICA's first four albums.