Metallica: 10 Awesome Lyric Meanings You Totally Missed
8. Welcome Home (Sanitarium)
When it comes to picking a favorite Metallica album, fans of the heavier variety tend to move towards Master of Puppets. The Black Album may have bigger hits, but this album showed the band at the peak of their powers, with some of the most indelible riffs of their career. Though songs like the title track take you on a harrowing journey, it's the slower track that really turns things on their head.
Straying away from the raw aggressive topics of their earlier work, "Welcome Home" tapped into something that felt much closer to reality. Inspired by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Hetfield wrote lyrics that portrayed the life of a man trapped in a mental institution.
The instrumentation does a great job at showing the different mood inflections of the mentally unstable, as the more sorrowful verses are brought up to more frantic breakdowns.
The mentally unhinged character portrait is something that many Metallica fans are aware of, but people don't pick up on what happens next. As the final charge begins, a half time groove kicks in and we hear our protagonist finally snap, as he finds any weapons he can and escapes to go on a killing spree. The guitars are definitely the highlight of the end, but the more lyrical fans are left wondering if our unhinged serial killer is still roaming the land.