Songfacts®:

• Many Metallica songs are about facing down demons and battling to stay sane. In this song, the singer is paranoid and on the brink of losing his mind.
• Baked into the intro is Metallica's take on the "oh-e-oh... e-oh-oh" chant heard in the movie The Wizard Of Oz when Dorothy and the gang approach the Wicked Witch Of The West's castle and find it guarded by terrifying flying monkeys. It's fitting for the song because that scene evokes and uncertainty and fear.
• The writing is credited to three of the four Metallica members: James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich and Kirk Hammett. ...And Justice For All was their first album following their 1986 tour bus accident in Sweden that claimed the life of their bass player, Cliff Burton. He was replaced by Jason Newsted, who didn't have much of a voice in the band early on - his bass is buried in the mix throughout the album.
  
  Burton's death cast a pall on the recording process, but they knew they had to push forward. "They were paralyzed with grief in many ways but they knew instinctively that they had to go on," Steffan Chirazi, editor of Metallica's magazine So What!, said on the Songfacts Podcast. "Cliff wouldn't have had it any other way. That's the truth."
• In the early '90s, the band would often play part of this song in a medley with other tracks from the album, but they didn't play it in its entirety until 2014. It's showed up in their setlists only a handful of times since.