Fade to Black (song)
| "Fade to Black" | |||||||||||||
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"Fade to Black" cover
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| Promotional single by Metallica from the album Ride the Lightning | |||||||||||||
| Released | September 30, 1984 | ||||||||||||
| Recorded | February 20 - March 14, 1984 at Sweet Silence Studios, Copenhagen, Denmark | ||||||||||||
| Genre | Heavy metal | ||||||||||||
| Length | 6:55 | ||||||||||||
| Label | Megaforce, Elektra | ||||||||||||
| Writer(s) | James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Cliff Burton, Kirk Hammett | ||||||||||||
| Producer(s) | Metallica, Flemming Rasmussen | ||||||||||||
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"Fade to Black" is a song by American heavy metal band Metallica, released as the first promotional single from its second studio album, Ride the Lightning. The song was ranked as having the 24th best guitar solo ever by Guitar World readers.
The song peaked at number 100 on Swiss Singles Chart in 2008. The song is certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America.
In an interview with drummer Lars Ulrich on the set of the production MTV Icon: Metallica in 2003, he recalls how he and vocalist/rhythm guitarist James Hetfield were "obsessed with death" at the time the album and song were produced.
The song's lyrics address suicidal feelings. It begins with an acoustic guitar introduction and becomes progressively heavier as the song goes on, similar to their future songs, "Welcome Home (Sanitarium)", "One", and "The Day That Never Comes". James Hetfield commented on the song in a 1991 interview with Guitar World:
That song was a big step for us. It was pretty much our first ballad, so we knew it would freak people out... Recording that song, I learned how frustrating acoustic guitar can be. You could hear every squeak, so I had to be careful. I wrote the song at a friend's house in New Jersey. I was pretty depressed at the time because our gear had just been stolen, and we had been thrown out of our manager's house for breaking shit and drinking his liquor cabinet dry. It's a suicide song, and we got a lot of flak for it, as if kids were killing themselves because of the song. But we also got hundreds of letters from kids telling us how they related to the song and that it made them feel better.
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Wikipedia