MEGADETH mainman Dave Mustaine offered an update on the recording sessions for the band’s follow-up to 2016’s Dystopia album, during a recent appearance on Full Metal Jackie.
“I just found out yesterday, believe it or not, we got our delivery date, when they want me to have the record turned in by,” Dave said. “I’ve had a pretty busy last two years. We were getting ready to start to record, and then stuff started going wrong with my throat, and we found out about the [throat] cancer. The treatment for the cancer was completed in six months, which was mind-blowing for me.
“But besides that, there were so many other things that had gone wrong — we have the pandemic here, and we have all these things that are going on. The work that I do that affects the people around me, it affects me ’cause I care so much about our fans.
“When we were out doing the Hendrix thing [‘Experience Hendrix’ tour] last year, we came back to just get started on the record,” Mustaine continued. “I thought, ‘Okay, we’re gonna blast through this.’ And then, boom, here comes the pandemic, and everything drops down a couple of gears. But you know what? We’re still working every day, and the record’s getting done.
He added: “It’s funny ’cause every person that I know — well, not every person, but the people that I know that know I’m writing a new record, and God bless ’em — they all go, ‘So, are you gonna write about the coronavirus?’ And I’m thinking, ‘Well, now there’s a thought…'”
Mustaine said about the record last month during an appearance on The Five Count radio show: “We’ve got, I think, probably one of the most ferocious records we’ve done since Rust In Peace. David Ellefson [MEGADETH bassist], he’s a pretty good barometer of things, and when he did his bass parts, he [went], ‘Man, my arm is killing me. I can’t believe this.’”
“We set out to do this last record because we’re all kind of getting a little older and we’re set in our ways and our families and stuff,” Mustaine added. “One guy [drummer Dirk Verbeuren] lives in California, another guy [Mustaine] lives in Tennessee, another guy [Ellefson] lives in Arizona, and Kiko [Loureiro, guitar] lives in f*cking Finland. I mean, not ‘f*cking Finland,’ but in Finland. Excuse me for the language there. I’m a little bit bothered about having to fly my guitar player from Finland.
