(Credits: Far Out / Tommy Holl)
Tue 12 August 2025 20:30, UK
James Hetfield has shaped the entire world of metal singing. Before him, it was about people who could scream at the top of their lungs, but he proved that people could bark their way through songs and still sound phenomenal. Then again, his inability to hit the high notes wasn’t always by design.
Before Metallica became a blip on the radar, Hetfield never saw himself as a singer. His first love was the guitar, and even though he was a riff master, there was no way they were going to make it as a purely instrumental act. As simplistic as it sounds, the band knew there needed to be words in the song, and the musician may as well have been the one to do it since he wasn’t stuck behind the drum kit.
Hetfield’s singing is a bit similar to the way he plays guitar. He’s a rhythmic musician by nature, and while his riffs often are a nightmare to try to figure out when starting out, his vocal lines are almost like their own percussion parts on the band’s earliest records, only switching up when he got his voice into shape working on The Black Album.
That made the band stick out a lot better, but for him, he only saw it as a major setback for the group. They didn’t have that one X-factor with his voice as far as he was concerned, and when scouring people in the Bay Area to play with, the frontman made sure to keep an eye out for people like John Bush as a potential replacement for him after the band established their footing.
Sure, the thrash icons had a decent amount of tunes under their belt with Kill ‘Em All, but since Bush had been getting along with the band so well when touring with them in his own outfit, Armoured Saint, Hetfield started to think he’d be better suited for their band, saying, “John Bush was a singer we got to know really well. We tried to get him into the band as the singer. It didn’t work out. He was dedicated and very in love with what he was doing with his brothers in Armoured Saint. We absolutely respect that.”
Listening to Bush’s voice, it’s not like he wouldn’t have been a good fit, either. He wasn’t going to be as percussive as Hetfield was in his prime, but whenever he opened his mouth in Armoured Saint, he had that vocal roar that most metal artists had been trying to reach ever since people like Ozzy Osbourne debuted. But even if Bush didn’t click with Metallica, he did take the call when Anthrax asked him to join.
Joey Belladonna would be some tough shoes to fill, but Bush pulled off the impossible by giving the band more depth. There was always a rub between Belladonna’s vocal chops and Anthrax’s punk-ish approach, but by bringing in more metallic influences, songs like ‘Only’ took all of the power of Anthrax and channelled it into something that sounded closer to traditional metal.
Hetfield may have been stuck with being the lead singer for the rest of his career, but given how well his tone worked on so many classic Metallica tracks, that might have been for the best. Bush was a fantastic singer and could have easily added something new to Metallica during those early days, but it would have been hard to live in a world where someone else was singing ‘Nothing Else Matters’. So, in that respect, Hetfield might not have been the best singer for Metallica, but he was the only singer the band could have asked for.
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