Part of a series “Metal Monoliths” about epically long metal songs.

As I’ve written in an article forthcoming in the journal Music Theory Online (( This article will be published at the end March 2021. Portions of this blog post appear in that article. )), metal songs often follow a pretty simple formula—as James Hetfield once said, “verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle eight and then out.” (( Kitts, Jeff.  “Cover Story,” Guitar World, December 1998, 54-62, 98-104. Cited by Raymond Aglugub in his 2007 Master’s Thesis. )) John Covach calls this “compound AABA form” (( Covach, John. 2005. “Form in Rock Music: A Primer.” Engaging Music: Essays in Music Analysis. Oxford University Press, pp. 65-76.)), where each of the As is a verse/chorus pair, and the B is some kind of contrasting section like the “middle eight.” This form is usually pretty easy to follow—you can find it on almost every track from any classic 80s album, like the most famous albums by Metallica, AC/DC, or Judas Priest.

But what happens when you stretch this formula out over a much longer time scale? Aaron Van Valkenburg wrote in his Master’s Thesis from 2010 about how Metallica expands this verse/chorus-based form by stuffing it with extra riffs in unexpected places, pushing towards longer and longer songs over their first four albums. Van Valkenburg says about perceiving large-scale AABA:

Metallica’s song structures are much more elaborate than most pop songs primarily because of their use of extended introductions, transitions, and instrumental solos (lead breaks). Nevertheless, Metallica’s music strives to subordinate these elaborations within a hierarchical system that highlights the verse-chorus rotation. This allows the listener to trace in his or her mind the large-scale progression inherent in the AABA structure.

(Van Valkenburg 2010, p. 30)

I found one even longer AABA song but it’s a bit harder to follow: “Suite Sister Mary” by Queensrÿche. And arguably, the AABA structure here is harder to keep in mind here—partly because of the evolving and shifting and progressive way in which Queensrÿche uses this form, and partly because it’s just so damn long.

This 10-minute-long song is the largest compound AABA form I’ve ever seen. The song’s biggest Verse/Chorus cycle (2:56–5:16) lasts for 2 minutes and 20 seconds, longer than some entire songs (such as Motörhead’s “Bite The Bullet, which clocks in at only 1:38). This incredible length makes it kind of hard to follow. Below is a form chart taken from my forthcoming article.

This song occurs at the climax of the album Operation: Mindcrime (1988), an epic concept album that tells the story of a vengeful and corrupt state with a media that has been bought and sold (does that ring a bell for anyone? Sigh). The narrator has taken a shadowy job as a hit man, hiding out with a nun named Mary who is also a victim of the corrupt system, apparently serving as a kind of sex slave for one of this alternate reality’s corrupt religious leaders. In this song, the protagonist’s double life as an assassin and a friend/lover collide, as he is asked to kill both Mary and the priest who abuses her.

The form in “Suite Sister Mary” is so complex enough that at first it’s hard to see the resemblance to the common compound AABA form. The first A section is actually kind of two Verses combined with two instrumental interludes into one kind of big mega-Verse. The second A section repeats the same strategy, but this time the “Narrator Strophe” riffs are slightly different, and instead of using instrumental interludes, the “Narrator” stanzas are interleaved with stanzas representing the character of “Mary.”

In Verse 1, the narrator is standing outside of Mary’s door, and in the lyrics he seems to be in denial about the task he is assigned. But the music is foreshadowing that tension with guitar riffs that sound like treading water, and ominous choirs interleaved with the narrator’s self-reflections. In Verse 2, the narrator confesses to Mary that he’s been sent to kill her; she responds by encouraging him to do it, and he tries to convince her life is still worth living. In the Chorus, the narrator exclaims that he sees their lives in parallel, and the end of her life will be ruinous for his. But at the end of the song, he fails to convince her. We hear the door closing, we don’t hear the gunshot, but the rest of the album makes it clear what has happened.

Changes between the first two A sections create formal progression: the A rotation does not merely repeat, but expands and develops to become something new. The first A section consists only of two equal strophes of lyrics alternated with clean-channel guitar riffs recycled from the Intro. The second A rotation adds a Pre-Verse, which transfers the Intro riff into a distorted guitar (this “electrification” of a riff is a strategy used in many other metal songs, such as “Black No. 1” by Type O Negative, or “Cirice” by Ghost). Then, in Verse 2, the earlier strophes in the voice of the protagonist are joined by strophes representing the perspective of his confidant and caregiver Mary. These new strophes’ greater urgency, and their departure from the tonic key, give them function similar to a Pre-Chorus. After Verse 2, there is also a new epic Chorus (”Mary, my lady of pain…”). While you can recognize Verse 2 as a return of the material from Verse 1, these added sections make it embody progression instead of repeating exactly.

These changes between Verse 1 and Verse 2 are part of the complexity I mentioned earlier that makes the compound AABA form hard to recognize; in most songs, Verse 2 repeats Verse 1 exactly. In “Suite Sister Mary,” we can still recognize the repetition of the Narrator Strophes in Verse 2 as a recurrence of the same, so it still feels like a Verse. But is it one Verse or two? Another factor is that we do not hear the Chorus until 4:48. For the first 5 minutes, the form is a sequence of Verses interspersed with what could be interludes or other sections; it’s only the arrival of the Chorus after almost 5 minutes that makes this feel like a “normal” metal song. And even then, the form is ambiguous; was the entire 5 minutes preceding this Chorus one single Verse cycle? The third A section in my analysis confirms the order of Pre-Verse, Verse, and Chorus, but it, too, is different from either of the preceding A sections: it only has one strophe each for the Narrator and Mary, joined by intense choral parts that give this final A section a new sense of climactic tension and high-stakes operatic drama.

I’ve analyzed many compound AABA metal songs over the last few years, and few have significant changes between successive Verse sections; even fewer have changes of this magnitude, adding a completely new character/strophe to the Verse. Additionally, no compound AABA form I’ve found has this degree of scale. This massive, majestic song occupies the climax of the album’s narrative, the undoing of the protagonists’ tenuous career in crime and the beginning of a descent which ends in the tragic brokenness of the final track, “Eyes of a Stranger.” Queensrÿche’s innovative and compelling use of compound AABA form—one of the most common conventions in metal music—makes this monolithic track a unique moment in the metal genre.

This series “Metal Monoliths” is about form in large-scale metal compositions, which I’ve been thinking about ever since I read Tim Smolko’s book about Jethro Tull’s “long songs.” The genre has many long songs that are spoken about in mythical terms because they push the limits of listeners’ attention spans, performers’ endurance, and space on recording mediums. But how do you build such long song forms in the same genre as 2-minute barnstormers fast enough to give you serious whiplash? Is music theory of any use or does it just tell us what we already know—that we struggle to comprehend the vastness of anything longer than 4 or 5 minues?

What are your favorite long metal songs that I should analyze next? Let me know in the comments below.