Metallica Reveal "Death Magnetic" Release Date, Talk New Video

Metallica finally revealed the last piece of the Death Magnetic puzzle, announcing their new Rick Rubin-produced album will be available worldwide on September 12th. While most albums are released in Europe on Monday and the States on Tuesday, Metallica are keeping with the unorthodox nature of this album's release, giving the world Death Magnetic on a Friday. We assume that Friday will also see the release of the playable Death Magnetic for Guitar Hero III.

Meanwhile, the band spoke to MTV News about the album's first video, for the track "The Day That Never Comes." Even though it was shot in California, the video has an Iraq War setting, focusing on a soldier's internal struggle over whether to shoot a suspicious man. "It's a story about human beings who don't know each other, in a particularly tense situation," drummer Lars Ulrich told MTV News. "It could be a contemporary war setting, but it's really about forgiveness and redemption and understanding what goes on in people's minds. We really feel that this was such a beautiful and epic way to treat the song in something that was really radically different than the specificity of the lyrics." James Hetfield echoed that the video isn't a political statement but an examination of humanity. No premiere date for the clip has been announced.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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