On a recent episode of “The Metallica Report,” James Hetfield discussed the structure of songwriting and his approach to writing lyrics.
“Having access to the sources and dictionaries and things like that nowadays is so great,” the frontman explained. “I mean, somebody will send me something and I’ll look at a word and I don’t know what that is. I highlight it, look it up. Hey, great. I got that. I will thumb through books just to see cool words and put ’em in a little pile and figure out where they belong. So it is kind of like building a vehicle, building a whatever, collecting lots of little words. And how do they fit together? What does this really mean? Is this enough for a subject matter?”
Hetfield continued, using Green Day as an example of how other bands write songs:
“Then I go and I watch a band like Green Day, and they have some simple — ‘know your enemy’ or ‘do you know your enemy?’, something like that. It’s, like, it’s so hooky and great, it sticks in you, but that’s not really literary geniusness. So ‘geniusness’ is another word I just made up. And there are times when I’ll make up words just to get a point across too.”
“For me, putting words into the song, it is like another instrument,” he added. “So if ‘and,’ ‘the,’ ‘if,’ those things get in the way, just get rid of ’em. You just want the meaty words to get in there and get the point across and be vague enough. But I’m not a storyteller. I’m not that.”
