I was 13 years old, locked in my bedroom with a pair of headphones and two records that seemed to contain an entire universe.
Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets were not background music. They were places.
I would sit there and disappear into them.
There was the obvious part, of course: the guitars, the speed, the aggression, the precision. But even then, before I had the vocabulary to explain any of it, I knew there was something else happening underneath.
There was melancholy in those records.
There was space.
There were melodies that felt almost too beautiful for music that heavy.
And there was Cliff Burton.
More Than a Bass Player
Cliff Burton changed the way I thought about what a bass guitar could be.
He was not simply holding down the bottom end while everyone else got on with the interesting stuff. His playing could lead, answer, disrupt and colour the entire emotional shape of a song.
Listen to Orion and the word “bass” almost becomes irrelevant.
It is composition.
The instrument becomes another voice in the arrangement, capable of melody, harmony and atmosphere. The lines move around the guitars rather than obediently sitting underneath them.
But what Cliff played was only part of it.
Why he played it was the incredible part.
There are plenty of technically gifted musicians who can fill every available space with notes. Cliff seemed to understand that the real question was not, “What can I play here?” but “What does this moment need?”
Sometimes the answer was weight.
Sometimes it was movement.
Sometimes it was a counter-melody that made the guitars feel larger.
Sometimes it was something almost mournful hiding underneath the violence.
That is what made his playing feel compositional rather than decorative. The bass was not simply supporting the song. It was helping explain what the song meant.
That idea stayed with me.
You do not have to accept the traditional role assigned to an instrument.
A bass can sing.
A guitar can become texture.
A synthesiser can behave like percussion.
Noise can become melody.
Silence can become part of the arrangement.
Genre rules are useful right up until the moment the song asks you to break them.
The 13-Year-Old With Headphones
I sometimes think back to that kid in the bedroom.
No streaming algorithm. No endless recommendations. No skipping through thirty seconds of a track because something else was waiting.
You put the record on and lived inside it.
The opening acoustic guitars of Fight Fire with Fire felt enormous because you knew what was coming.
Fade to Black proved that heaviness did not require constant volume.
The Call of Ktulu sounded mysterious and almost cinematic long before I would have used that word to describe music.
Then Master of Puppets pushed everything further.
The arrangements were longer, stranger and more confident.
Battery could begin with delicate layered guitars and suddenly detonate.
Welcome Home (Sanitarium) could move from restraint to violence without losing its emotional thread.
And Orion could stop being a metal song altogether for a few minutes and drift somewhere else entirely.
That was probably one of the earliest lessons I absorbed about songwriting.
You are allowed to go somewhere else.
You just have to make the listener want to follow you.
The Darkness After Cliff
Cliff Burton died on 27 September 1986, aged just 24.
Metallica continued, of course, and two years later released …And Justice for All.
That album has always felt different to me.
There is something bleak about it.
Not simply heavy or angry. Bleak.
The songs feel colder, more isolated and more severe. The production is famously dry and stark, but that atmosphere reaches beyond the mix.
There is sorrow running through the record.
Sometimes it is buried beneath anger and complexity. Sometimes it arrives directly, as it does in To Live Is to Die, which contains musical ideas associated with Cliff.
The whole record feels like a band pushing forward while carrying something enormous behind them.
Whether every part of that atmosphere was consciously connected to grief almost does not matter from the listener’s perspective.
That is what the record communicates to me.
Loss.
Distance.
Anger.
Movement without closure.
It is an extraordinary album because it never tries to make those emotions comfortable.
Heavy Does Not Mean One Thing
Those Metallica records taught me something I probably did not fully understand until much later.
Heavy music does not have to mean distorted guitars.
Heaviness can come from harmony.
From repetition.
From a bass note that refuses to move.
From a synthesiser slowly opening underneath a vocal.
From a drum pattern that feels slightly too large for the room.
From silence after something devastating.
That idea eventually became part of the way I approach Most Epic Dream.
MED is obviously a long way from 1980s Metallica stylistically. Electronic music, trip-hop, ambient music, post-rock, synths and cinematic textures all occupy much more space in what I make now.
But the underlying lesson is still there.
Let instruments escape their expected roles.
Let songs breathe.
Let darkness exist beside melody.
Do not be frightened of long arrangements if the journey earns them.
Do not confuse complexity with meaning.
And do not confuse heaviness with volume.
The most important part of arranging is not choosing an interesting sound.
It is understanding why that sound belongs there.
Forty Years Later
Forty years after Cliff Burton’s death, his influence is still everywhere.
You can hear it directly in generations of bass players, but I think his larger legacy is more interesting.
He represented musical curiosity inside a genre that could easily have become rigid.
Classical harmony, distortion, melody, aggression, improvisation and atmosphere could all exist in the same piece of music.
That matters to me far more than genre purity ever will.
Somewhere in the music I make today, there is still a 13-year-old kid sitting alone in a bedroom with headphones on, completely absorbed by Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets.
And somewhere nearby is the strange, cold shadow of …And Justice for All.
Those records taught me that beautiful music can be brutal.
Brutal music can be beautiful.
And sometimes the most interesting place to write from is the space in between.