About The Song
“For Whom the Bell Tolls” is a song by American thrash metal band Metallica. It was first released on their second studio album, Ride the Lightning (1984). Elektra Records also released it as a promotional single, with both edited and full-length versions. In March 2018 the song ranked number five on the band’s live performance count. Several live albums and video albums include the song. In March 2023, Rolling Stone magazine ranked “For Whom the Bell Tolls” at number 39 on their “100 Greatest Heavy Metal Songs of All Time” list.
The song was inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls about the process of death in modern warfare and the bloody Spanish Civil War. Specific allusions are made to the scene described in Chapter 27 of the book, in which five soldiers are obliterated during an airstrike after taking a defensive position on a hill.
Cliff Burton plays the bass guitar introduction with heavy distortion and a wah pedal. There were three tracks of bass that he recorded, lead bass (distorted), bass (non-distorted), and harmonics over the lead. Burton wrote the intro before joining Metallica and first played it during a 12-minute jam at a battle of the bands with his second band Agents of Misfortune in 1979.
The bell sound heard at the beginning of the track was actually produced by drummer Lars Ulrich striking an anvil with a metal hammer in combination with a bell from a sound effects reel.
Video
Lyrics
Make his fight on the hill in the early day
Constant chill deep inside
Shouting gun, on they run through the endless grey
Oh they fight, for the right, yes, but who’s to say?
For a hill, men would kill, why? They do not know
Stiffened wounds test their pride
Men of five, still alive through the raging glow
Gone insane from the pain that they surely know
For whom the bell tolls
Time marches on
For whom the bell tolls
Take a look to the sky just before you die
It’s the last time you will
Blackened roar, massive roar fills the crumbling sky
Shattered goal fills his soul with a ruthless cry
Stranger now are his eyes to this mystery
Hears the silence so loud
Crack of dawn, all is gone except the will to be
Now they see what will be, blinded eyes to see
For whom the bell tolls
Time marches on
For whom the bell tolls