10 Greatest Hard Rock Songs (Without Vocals)
1. To Live Is To Die - Metallica
It's always an uphill battle whenever a band loses a founding member. After it looked like Metallica were about to go the distance off the strength of Master of Puppets, everything came crashing down when bassist Cliff Burton was killed in a bus accident while on tour. Though And Justice for All saw them picking up the pieces of their broken state of mind, To Live Is To Die is one of the greatest ways to honor their fallen friend.
As this nine minute journey unfolds, we start to hear Metallica getting to work on the usual instrumental that they've had across every album, with riffs that feel as solid as concrete. While things are going smoothly, the real gut punch of the song comes in the mid section, when the low-fi guitars come in leading to James Hetfield's solo break. Given the massive amount of pain they went through, this entire crescendo feels like a documentation of what happened, as these kids struggle to come to grips with a friend and fellow collaborator that they'll never see again.
Once the riffs come soaring back in, we hear a poem recitation going over the main theme, which is one of the final musical pieces that Burton wrote before he passed away. Thousands of bands have paid tribute to the heroes of days gone by, but coming from your former bandmates, this is about as epic as a sendoff gets.