Metallica were up to all kinds of madness in the 90s, from writing the biggest metal album of all time, to taking inspiration from U2 and Nick Cave on an album that featured blood and, ah, other fluids on its cover, to doing an entire concert with an orchestra, it was a wild time. So it should have been no surprise to anyone that when they when they released their first ever song with a guest feature, it wasn’t with a thrash metal peer or a guitar shredder; it was with a 60s folk singer who most of their fans only knew as Mick Jagger’s ex-girlfriend.
The gap between Metallica's 1991 cultural behemoth The Black Album and 1996’s hugely divisive Load meant that no one was really expecting new material from the band in 1997. So it was something of a shock to learn that Metallica weren’t actually finished with the Load sessions.
