Nothing Else Matters
by Metallica
How to study this song
The card for “Nothing Else Matters” is built from 29 study entries at A1+: 9 English words, 5 adjectives and 15 verb forms. Work through the glossary first: heart, way and life are the words you will lean on most. This one leans on its verbs: 15 distinct forms against 5 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.
The words of this song, in several languages
Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.
Vocabulary
| EN | ES | IT | FR | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| heart | corazón | cuore | cœur | coração | hart | Herz |
Adjectives
| EN | ES | IT | FR | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| close | cerca, cercano | vicino | proche | perto | dichtbij | nah, nahe |
This card holds 4 more adjectives. You meet them when you play the song.
Verb forms
| EN | ES | IT | FR | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| couldn't be | no podría ser | non potrebbe essere | ne pourrait pas être | não podia ser | zou niet kunnen zijn | könnte nicht sein |
What this song teaches you
Level · A1+
- Vocabulary words
- 9
- Adjectives
- 5
- Word combos
- 5
- Expressions
- 10
- Verb forms
- 15
- Quiz questions
- 35
Background
About the song
«Nothing Else Matters» is the ballad at the centre of «Metallica», the self-titled fifth album that the American band released in August 1991 and that most fans simply call «the Black Album». It came out as a single on 20 April 1992 in the United States and a week later in Europe, the third single from the record after «Enter Sandman» and «The Unforgiven». For a band that had built its reputation in the 1980s on fast, aggressive thrash metal, releasing a slow love song with an orchestra behind it was a genuine risk. It turned out to be one of the most important decisions of their career.
The song began as something James Hetfield never intended to share. In 1990 the band was on tour and Hetfield, the singer and rhythm guitarist, was unhappy about spending so long away from home. According to the band’s own account, the gentle guitar figure that opens the track came to him while he was on the phone with his girlfriend, holding the guitar in one hand. He worked it into a complete song for himself, as a private piece, and he was reluctant to show it to the others because he felt it did not fit the image of Metallica. It was the drummer Lars Ulrich who heard it and insisted that it belonged on the album.
The lyric is short and very direct. It is addressed to someone the singer trusts completely, and its idea is that distance changes nothing when two people are truly close. The singer admits that he has never opened up in this way before, says that the words he offers are meant sincerely, and describes each new day together as something fresh. Against that closeness he sets the rest of the world: the opinions, habits and schemes of other people, which he explicitly refuses to worry about. The title sums up the whole message. When the bond is strong enough, nothing outside it is important.
That message is carried by very plain English, which is exactly why the song is so useful to a learner. Almost every word belongs to the first thousand words of the language: heart, life, day, mind, trust, close, far, new. The interest lies in the way the lines are built. The subject is often left out at the start of a line, as people do in speech and in songs; one line moves the object to the front for emphasis; and the refrain rests on the structure «no matter how», the standard way English says that a condition makes no difference. Possessives and pronouns such as our, ours, us and myself appear within a few lines of each other, which makes the lyric a compact review of that area of grammar.