In a new episode of the Metallica Report podcast, James Hetfield picked an unexpected lyricist as the greatest.
“As far as Tom Waits just being a master craftsman at lyrics, painting a picture in one sentence, it interests me, and it takes work,” said the singer. “I saw Tom kind of live it. It was his vocabulary as well. He could sit and speak like that. I can’t.”
In a 1996 interview with Guitar World, Hetfield first publicly praised Waits while promoting the ‘Load’ album. He stated, “I’ve been really focusing on lyricists — as opposed to people who just sit down and crank out some words for a song — who write f*cking poems and then put music to them.”
“I wanted to understand other people’s ideas about how to write lyrics. Nick Cave’s ‘Murder Ballads’ are the coolest, and I dig all the Tom Waits stuff. I’ve even listened to some Leonard Cohen. I mean, I hate the f*cking music, but his lyrics are very cool,” Hetfield further shared.
On The Metallica Report podcast, Hetfield also talked about his interest in words and how it influences his songwriting. The rocker explained, “I see words that are interesting out of curiosity to me and I would say that coming from a graphics background, the way a word looks is almost more important. Like ‘Lux Aeterna,’ how cool is that? There’s an ‘x’ in it and then an ‘AE’ together?! How cool.”
James went on to say, “Having access to thesauruses and dictionaries and things like that today is so great. Somebody will send me something and I look at a word and I don’t know what that is, but I look it up and, ‘Hey, I got that.'”
“I will thumb through books just to see cool words, put ’em in a pile and figure out where they belong. It is like building a vehicle … collecting lots of words and they fit together. But what does it really mean? Is it enough for a subject matter?” he also noted.
Metallica released their latest album, ’72 Seasons,’ in 2023 and will tour North America in the spring, starting with their first show on April 19 at the Syracuse MA Wireless Dome, NY.
