Lars Ulrich’s All-Time *Least* Favorite Metallica Song is…
Earlier this month we learned which song from Metallica’s nearly 40-year catalogue is his favorite, and now, because the metalnet never tires of Metallica headline$, we know what his least favorite is, too! Our lives are forever enriched.
Speaking to GQ earlier this month, the drummer said of his all-time ‘Tallica fave:
“‘Sad But True.’ I just love playing that song. I play it a little differently each time. I love the tempo and giving it a different interpretation every time I play it.”
Now, in a chat with pop culture site Vulture, he’s revealed the one song he’d be fine never hearing again:
“There’s a song called ‘Eye of the Beholder’ on the ‘Justice’ album. Wherever I hear that song, it sounds kind of like — I guess we don’t want to be super-disrespectful to it — but it sounds really forced. It sounds like you put a square peg in a round hole. It sounds like it’s got two different tempos. There’s kind of a 4/4 feel in the intro and on the verses, and then I think the choruses are more like in a waltz tempo. It literally sounds like two different worlds rubbing up against each other. It sounds very awkward to me. I’m not a huge fan of that song.
Does that make you want to hit “skip” every time the song comes on from now on? I have that desire, but not because of what Lars said — because the song reminds me of the putrid B.O. smell of several thousand cos-players at New York Comic Con. All those years MetalSucks had a booth there we blasted nothing but Metallica, because Metallica brings the boys to the yard.
Lars elaborated, saying he prefers not to dwell on past missteps and doesn’t even listen to Metallica’s recorded output:
“I guess the asterisk is that, to me, we did the best we could each moment. So of course, sometimes you sit down and go ‘Huh?’ or ‘That could have been better’ or ‘That was a little awkward’ or ‘That feels a little silly or easy’ or ‘That feels over-thought-out’ or whatever. It goes back to that whole thing about the past is the past, and I don’t spend a long time back there. And there’s not really much I can do about it [laughs] and honestly, I don’t listen to them. I don’t listen to a lot of Metallica music. Part of it is because I’m sort of overly analytical [about the details]. It’s basically almost impossible for me to listen to a Metallica song without going, ‘Okay, how are the sonics, how’s the mix, how does the guitar sound? The vocals are too loud, the bass is too boomy.’ It becomes this exercise in analytics. When you hear your favorite band — like if I listened to Rage Against the Machine or something, I just fucking let myself go. But when Metallica comes on it’s like, ‘Huh?’”
Metallica have been working on new song ideas remotely during the pandemic, with James Hetfield, Lars and Kirk Hammett all recently saying they’ve been writing independently and plan to jam together in a “bubble” some time later this year. The band hosted a pre-recorded drive-in concert in August at hundreds of outdoor movie theaters and just released a recording of last year’s S&M2 concert, which beat out Katy Perry for top-selling new album in its first week of release. Meanwhile, a re-worked version of “Nothing Else Matters” is slated to appear in the upcoming Disney film, Jungle Cruise.
Metallica have been working on new song ideas remotely during the pandemic, with James Hetfield, Lars and Kirk Hammett all recently saying they’ve been writing independently and plan to jam together in a “bubble” some time later this year. The band hosted a pre-recorded drive-in concert in August at hundreds of outdoor movie theaters and just released a recording of last year’s S&M2 concert, which beat out Katy Perry for top-selling new album in its first week of release. Meanwhile, a re-worked version of “Nothing Else Matters” is slated to appear in the upcoming Disney film, Jungle Cruise.
