Metallica: 10 Awesome Lyric Meanings You Totally Missed
4. No Leaf Clover
While many fans were perplexed at Metallica's collaboration with an orchestra for their S&M concerts, the actual execution ended up making too much sense. Under the classical direction of Michael Kamen, these songs went from being brash metal tunes to some of the most well-arranged compositions in the entire rock canon.
When the band wrote a song to go along with the orchestral backing, they could have easily rested on their laurels and written a song about nothing for the sake of instrumental flexing. On the other hand, "No Leaf Clover" has a lyric sheet that hits a much more somber note than you might expect.
The start of the song seems to be about a starry-eyed kid who has finally reached the big leagues, but the song has a much more menacing bite once you hit the chorus. Hetfield's description of this kid's dreams quickly shifts from a light of hope to a freight train about to run him over. This is an ideal compliment to the orchestral backing, which builds to intense crescendos as the freight train lyric sends us off. "No Leaf Clover" could have just been a cheap bonus track, but Metallica showed that nothing they ever put out is half-hearted.