Metallica frontman James Hetfield has drawn on many different areas to compose music. From drug abuse to modern warfare, the trash metal hero fears no topic when penning tunes. It goes without saying that Hetfield has a particular preference for more profound matters and getting real with his audience. This is to the extent that he even wrote a song about the tragic life of the late Amy Winehouse.
The song is ‘Moth Into Flame’, taken from the 2016 album Hardwired… to Self-Destruct. Opening with the line, “Blacked out / Pop queen, amphetamine / The screams crashed into silence”, the song tells the story of a pop star who burns out as quickly as she rises. Reflecting on the lyrics, Hetfield explained to Metallica’s official fanzine, So What: “‘Moth Into Flame’ is pretty literal. These days, everyone [has] an obsession with being famous. Being popular. Whether it’s your Facebook account or walking around the street, watching someone doing selfies of themselves as they’re walking down the street. Like what? What are you doing?”
When appearing on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast in 2016, the metal frontman offered further elucidation about the track. He said: “There’s a song on the album called ‘Moth Into Flame’ that directly talks about how fame can be this crazy drug, and it can completely take you over if you let it. You’re searching for that thing that’s going to save you, and it’s you. It’s in you, it’s already there. You just gotta find it and accept it.”
However, when speaking to Guitar World that year, Hetfield revealed that ‘Moth Into Flame’ is about the late Amy Winehouse. Providing an incisive account of how fame attracts people but proves to be much different than perceived from the outside, he stated: “The ‘pop queen’ in the song is not really female or male. It’s about how people think popularity or fame is going to solve their problems. Or whether fame should even be a goal for a musician. For us, fame has sometimes been a burden, like, how do we get rid of this thing? [Laughs] It’s a Pandora’s box that often makes you wonder, Okay, how do I become un-famous? Some people have felt that urge so strongly they’ve taken their own lives to escape it.”
Then, Hetfield explained that celebrated filmmaker Asif Kapadia’s 2015 Amy Winehouse documentary, Amy, inspired him to pen the track: “When I watched it, it really made me sad that a talented person like that fell for the fame part of it. But, to some degree, I see that mentality reflected in everyday life — people obsessively taking selfies and sending them to friends for validation.”
Speaking to 102.1 Edge FM, Hetfield expanded on the movie and Winehouse’s effect on him. He commented: “Just watching that movie was extremely saddening – how her life went from such a lively, joyous person to someone who was just trying to escape the reality of where she was.”
“It really hit me in the one part of the movie where she was lost in her mind, it seemed, and she was just leaving her flat in England. The press were just hanging out in front of her place all the time, snapping these pictures of her. ‘Hey, Amy, how’s it going?’ Talking to her like they know her,” he concluded. “They just don’t notice – they wouldn’t say, ‘You look skinny, you look unhealthy.’ There was a total misconnection there with reality.”
