Blacklisted!

On the Metallica Blacklist, 53 acts try their hand at reinterpreting one of the Black album’s 12 tracks in their own voice. Here, four artists — St. Vincent, Ghost’s Tobias Forge, Royal Blood’s Mike Kerr and Rodrigo y Gabriela’s Rodrigo Sánchez — discuss how they did it, and what Metallica means to each of them.

- By Richard Bienstock

ST. VINCENT, “SAD BUT TRUE”

Why did you choose to cover “Sad But True”?

ST. VINCENT: I think every person has an internal BPM, their own kind of natural tempo. So I thought about doing a faster tune, but then I thought, You know what? I think my natural BPM is this, like, swamp-stomp “Sad But True” BPM. And as far as adding the programmed drums and the instrumentation, I just sort of asked myself, “Okay… how would Skinny Puppy cover Metallica?”

You play several guitar solos in your version. The first one is more of a blues-based lead, which isn’t the type of thing we typically hear from you. Was it fun?

It totally was. With that first solo I was like, “Okay, I need to do right by Kirk and pay homage to his choices.” And so I learned his solo and then did my own take on it. Whereas the second solo, I just said, “Well, what would I do? What’s my natural instinct on this?” And that solo, it’s all me.

How did you approach the song from a vocal perspective?

It’s interesting inhabiting the lyrics of the song, because they’re, like, full-throttle, hands-around-your-neck lyrics. And so I had to find my way into that. Because I don’t have a low Doberman growl like James Hetfield does. I had to think about it: How can I portray menace in this that isn’t coming from a deep baritone place?

How did you get turned on to Metallica?