Megadeth recently kicked off their summer tour with Meshuggah, Tesseract and Lillake, and while they’ll be heading back on the road this fall with Scorpions, the band are also aiming to return to the studio to begin working on the follow-up to 2016’s Dystopia.
Dave Mustaine offered up the scoop to WRIF’s Meltdown and also touched on his process when crafting a new song:
“I will actually tell you first. We did start talking about scheduling the next record last night. We’re looking at November, December of this year starting to get back together and find a place to start demoing up songs. Of course, we have so many songs archived, and it’s not really a matter of having to go in there, beat your head and trying to come up with stuff; it’s listening to the 200 ideas that are there and picking some stuff out of there and seeing what it inspires… For me, it’s not like I have to go, ‘Oh my God! I’ve lost the mojo! What am I going to do?’ I just have to hear it again. I have this really innate ability to transcend where I’m at mentally when I’m playing music. I can go to a place where I can just absorb what I’m hearing and it just takes me away to a really great heavy, thrash place, you know.”
As far as archived ideas go, they can go way back, according to Mustaine, and also yield some of the best tracks:
“Could be 35 years old…since the very, very first record…I had songs when I went in to do the first record that ended up on the third record. ‘Set the World Afire,’ ‘Rust in Peace,’ ‘Hanger 18’…those songs were already written. I did those in Panic before Metallica.”
While Mustaine is Megadeth’s primary songwriter, obviously additional ideas are always brought to the table. So, how does Mustaine find a way to make time to really take in ideas from guitarist Kiko Loureiro and bassist David Ellefson while also juggling various side-projects? Like all seasoned pros, he has a system:
“Everybody has great ideas. The problem is there’s so many great ideas. So for me I learned a long time ago instead of putting our friendship on the line and cause any problems between them and myself that when they submit songs and stuff they just submit it to management and the label…See, it would suck, wouldn’t it, if they had a great song and I heard it and I was busy during the day, or I had something going on that was some kind of hectic bullshit, and they played this great song for me, and I didn’t hear it, and it was gone forever. That would suck, wouldn’t it?
Agreed, that really would suck. What doesn’t suck, however, is catching Megadeth live. For a complete list of upcoming tour dates, head over to Megadeth.com.
To listen to this interview in its entirety, go to WRIF.com.
Erica Banas is a rock/classic rock blogger. The first man she ever loved was Jack Daniel. (True story.)