James Hetfield says that Mama Said was never meant to be a Metallica song

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Mama Said, one of the defining singles from Metallica’s 1996 album Load, wasn’t originally intended to be released by the band.

This has been revealed by a 1996 interview with singer/guitarist James Hetfield, which was this week unearthed and uploaded to YouTube by the channel ‘TMF – The Music Factory’.

During the conversation, Hetfield, who wrote the song and exclusively plays acoustic guitar throughout its run-time, compares Mama Said’s creation with that of 1991 megahit Nothing Else Matters, which started as an intimate track no one else was ever intended to hear.

“[Mama Said] was myself writing something for me: just out on the road, being bored, being in your hotel room,” the frontman says. “It wasn’t really for others to hear. It was some real personal stuff.”

Hetfield adds that, somehow, his bandmates overheard him playing the song and saw potential in it. “They saw something there, something real from deep inside,” he continues. “It was pretty heavy, meaning-wise. So, we worked on it and turned it into a Metallica song. It wasn’t originally supposed to be one.”

One of Hetfield’s most lyrically vulnerable songs, Mama Said is about the musician’s complicated relationship with his mother, who was a Christian Scientist that died of cancer in February 1980, when her son was 16 years old.

The track hints at discord between the two (“Let my heart go, let your son grow”), but Hetfield also laments his lack of gratitude for his mother while she was alive (“I took your love for granted, all the things you said to me”).

Load came out on June 4, 1996, and Mama Said received a single release on November 25. The song charted well in Europe, reaching number one on the UK Rock & Metal chart and 19 on the UK Singles chart.

Despite that success, Metallica have never played Mama Said live as a unit, with its only known performances being two solo acoustic renditions by Hetfield in November 1996, one for UK TV show Later With Jools Holland and the other for Swedish programme Sverige-Sovjet.

On Friday (June 13), Metallica reissued Load across a series of titanic boxsets, offering almost 300 tracks from around that era, including many previously unheard demos, edits and live versions. The album was remastered by Reuben Cohen.

Earlier this year, lead guitarist Kirk Hammett expressed an openness to revisit Load’s bluesier sound on future Metallica albums.