Enter Sandman — Rina Sawayama Lyrics

Song Facts:

Rina Sawayama has paid her take on Metallica's "Enter Sandman," taken from their album *The Metallica Blacklist,* released September 10, 2021. The debut of this cover happened on August 26, 2021, as part of the celebrative tribute marking 30 years of existence of Metallica's self-titled album, commonly known as The Black Album. Her variant version of the song includes production done by Clarence Cljsonbe. All profits from this cover by her are, in fact, going to be divided between the charity Positive East and Metallica All Within My Hands Foundation.

Annotations and Meaning:

Rina Sawayama takes on this "Enter Sandman" cover, never straying from the original too much in some key musical elements, but making it very much hers in terms of lyrics and tone. The song talks of a bedtime story in which a protagonist exhorts a child to say his prayers and make a promise of protection against injury before sleep overpowers. But then, reassurance from a scary thought comes with a "but" and is followed by an inexorable "something is wrong" looming over the song. This paradox well captures the light-to-darkness journey, finally bursting into the flight to the mythic "never-never land".
On the theme of the cover of Sawayama, the idea is that of contrasting comfort and fear; reality and imagination; set as a metaphor of passage from innocence to awareness. It is the structural narrative of the song, then added to its heavy and industrial rock sound, which captures in tones the turmoil and beauty of this transition, pointing to Sawayama's overall masterful ability to cross and blend genres in a seamless fashion. Her contribution to *The Metallica Blacklist* notjsonly honors Metallica's heritage in that way, but also proves how distinct in personality musically it is, driving a point home to the listener that it is of all time and will never go away through all these different musical landscapes and generations.

Essentially, Rina Sawayama's version of "Enter Sandman" covers every bit of versatility and truth in the song's themes of protection, fear, and what it means to be plunged into the foreign. From that perspective, Sjsonne further builds the story by drawing the listener right into the metaphoric shadowy deeps of the night and the fantasies lived there. In her version, the storyline of the original lifted up to quite a new height, and the singer presents the new breath of the track while being true to its roots in the metal and rock genre.