Songfacts®:

• Kirk Hammett recorded "High Plains Drifter" for his debut solo EP Portals, a collection of instrumental tracks intended to be "sounds and pieces of music" for the movies playing in his head. The Metallica guitarist didn't originally set out to write music inspired by the 1973 Clint Eastwood film of the same name, but once he'd written it, Hammett thought it conveyed the same sentiment as High Plains Drifter, so he titled the piece accordingly.
• The music for "High Plains Drifter" initially came from a Flamenco piece Hammett had written. "It was a two-and-a-half-minute piece, and I really liked it, but it was one of those riffs that would be hard to integrate into Metallica. I knew I wanted to do something with it, even though it came out spontaneously," he explained. "I had been sitting outside messing around with a Flamenco acoustic guitar I'd just bought, and it flowed out in the moment. I was determined it would have a life. It would have its moment."
• Portals is the first solo project from any Metallica member while active in the heavy metal outfit. One reason the band members had previously fought shy of recording anything outside the group was the fallout when then-bassist Jason Newsted proposed Metallica take a hiatus so he could focus on his side-project Echobrain. The rift his suggestion created with the other band members (especially James Hetfield) led to him quitting the group.
• Hammett co-wrote the song with Edwin Outwater, the conductor behind Metallica's S&M2 converts and releases. Outwater also plays keyboards and conducts on the track. Other contributors include Metallica producer Greg Fidelman on bass guitar, Jon Theodore of Queens Of The Stone Age on drums, and members of the LA Philharmonic.
• While Hammett considers this an instrumental, it contains wordless vocals sung by Eliza Bagg. A Los Angeles and New York-based experimental musician, Bagg works primarily as a contemporary classical music vocalist.
• LA animation studio Awesome + modest (Bo Burnham, The Mountain Goats, U2: From The Sky Down) created the psychedelic animated video.