You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh Herway.

Metallica formed in 1981. They were teenagers. Since then, they've gone on to become one of the most successful bands of all time, selling over 110 million records worldwide.

In November 2016, they released their 10,000 hardwired to self-destruct. In this episode, the song Moth and Deflame gets taken apart by singer and guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich.

I'm letting you in a lot of trade secrets here. I've never really talked about this stuff in this detail.

It's Metallica on Song Exploder.

I am Lars Ulrich and I am the drummer of Metallica.

James here, singer, rhythm guitar player Metallica.

About two summers ago in 2014, I was given an iPod by our on the road engineer that has about 1500 ideas on it, accumulated from sound checks.

Just warming up on the guitar or even just rehearsing or just getting an idea and I just hummed the riff into the tape.

There's nothing that happens in this band these days that's not recorded.

And then I kind of step back at that point. I've written the riff. I've done my part with that. I need some fresh ears to hear what's got potential and what doesn't.

And so over that summer, I spent a lot of time listening to that iPod and I presented James with my first pass at what I thought were potential moments.

And I think that's why I've been doing this for the next record.

I have a trust in Lars because he's got a really good musical ear and he's a drummer. He hears the riff differently than I do.

He's pretty good at picking out some of the best stuff.

There may have been 20 or 30 that I flagged and one of them was called Plow.

Why was Cole Plow?

I think it had that feeling of just it could push through anything. It's like, okay, nothing's going to stop this riff.

Every single song we do starts with just that, a riff.

We have a fairly traditional view of songwriting. We always try to build what we call a cycle.

So the main riff, a verse bridge and a chorus, that's a cycle.

A lot of what we do in our songwriting is kind of taking riffs, basically like a puzzle, just trying to connect them.

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