Metallica joins Bruce Springsteen, Roger Waters, Celine Dion and other artist to pay tribute to Ennio Morricone on "We All Love Ennio Morricone" to be released on February 23, 2007. Most appropriately, Metallica recored their own rendition of "The Ecstasy of Gold" to be included on the tribute album.  James Hetfield explains: "I have been inspired by Morricone's raw unbridled emotion, especially in his western scores.  As a band, we have used his moving 'Ecstasy Of Gold' piece as an intro to our performances since 1983."

Every Metallica fan is familiar with "The Ecstasy of Gold", originally from the classic film "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly".  But how many know of the man himself? Ennio Morricone is an Italian composer especially noted for his film scores. He has composed the scores of more than 500 films and TV series. Although only 30 of these are for Western films, it is for this work which he is best known.  Morricone's sparse style of composition for the genre is particularly exemplified by the soundtracks of the classic spaghetti westerns The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968).