10 Perfect Hard Rock Songs That Are Ridiculously Long
2. To Live Is To Die - Metallica
It's never easy to get over a death in the band. If you see yourself as a band of brothers, it gets harder and harder to continue knowing that the one piece of the musical puzzle isn't in the mix anymore. Metallica were still clearly hurting after the loss of bassist Cliff Burton, and the next album gave us a track that feels like a celebration of his work.
Shortly into the tour cycle for Master of Puppets, Burton was killed in a bus accident, leaving the band in limbo before eventually drafting in Jason Newsted as his replacement. Though the bassist didn't even hear a ton of his own bass lines on And Justice For All, To Live Is To Die is a loving ode to what Cliff stood for, along with being a cathartic form of therapy for the band to work through. After the initial riffs start as your standard metal instrumental, the mid section feels like a musical version of documenting what happened, with the lofi guitar describing the crash and the harmonized section being the band coming to grips with the massive loss that they have just witnessed.
While this is still considered an instrumental, there is a bit of spoken word towards the end, as James Hetfield recites a poem that remains one of the last things that Burton ever wrote before he passed away. Cliff's death was always going to be a heavy blow, but this was one of the first steps for the band to heal.