“I can’t speak for what James wrote, but to me, the song was all about him trying to write a love song without saying the word ‘love.’

“It’s interesting: The man that I knew back then… he could certainly feel love, but he could never say the word, especially in a Metallica song. This is his genius, to be able to say it in his own way and really mean it, despite everything he was going through, all the demons, all the anger he had in him. I think it’s one of Metallica’s best songs ever.

“Musically, we wanted it big but not bombastic. We wanted size and weight, but we didn’t want to do what all the ‘80s metal bands were doing in those kind of cheesy power ballads. We really worked out the arrangement to make it huge and dramatic… but real.”

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