Megadeth singer/guitarist Dave Mustaine has revealed that the band have at least two songs left over from the recording of their final album. However, he’s not set on releasing them.
Talking exclusively in the upcoming issue of Metal Hammer, Mustaine, 64, reveals two tracks that didn’t make the cut on this January’s Megadeth, called Bloodlust and Farewell My Love. He also names a possible third, When Robots Rule, before conceding that he may have made that title up due to his 2019 treatment for throat cancer affecting his memory.
“But I might be mixing things up,” he tells us. “That’s another byproduct of chemo and radiation called ‘chemo brain’, where you have a really hard time remembering things.”
These songs are part of a bunch of unfinished tracks that Megadeth have made over the course of their 43-year career. But according to Mustaine, who plans to break the band up due to him living with the hand condition Dupuytren’s contracture, revisiting these ideas would not be at the top of his to-do list were he to continue his career.
“If I could play old songs,” he says, “why wouldn’t I want to focus on new songs instead?”
Mustaine announced Megadeth’s impending retirement last August, saying that he wanted the Grammy-winning thrashers, whom he formed upon his expulsion from Metallica in 1983, to go out on their own terms. He urged fans, “Don’t be mad, don’t be sad, be happy for us all, come celebrate with me these next few years.”
He revealed his Dupuytren’s contracture in December and said that it was a major contributor to his decision to break the band up. He added during an interview with YouTube channel MariskalRockTV that the condition, which causes one or more fingers to bend inwards towards the palm, “makes it really painful to play” guitar.
Megadeth came out via BLKIIBLK on January 23 and was a commercial success. It was the first of the band’s 17 studio albums to top the US Billboard 200 chart. The closest they’d come previously was with 1992’s Countdown To Extinction, which reached number two.
The band’s farewell tour kicked off with a run of North American concerts earlier this year and will resume with a performance at the Alaska State Fair on Saturday (August 22). They’ll support Iron Maiden on the North American leg of their 50th-anniversary Run For Your Lives world tour from August 29 to September 29, then again at the band’s Australia and New Zealand shows in November. A European headline tour is in place for March and April.
In addition, Mustaine is set to release his third memoir, In My Darkest Hour, on September 8 via De Capo. The book will focus on his 2019 cancer battle. He was diagnosed with a squamous cell carcinoma at the back of his tongue in the February and revealed his condition to fans the following June. Doctors gave him the all-clear that October.
In My Darkest Hour was co-written by The New York Times’ Joe Layden, who previously worked with Mustaine on 2010’s Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir. Mustaine’s last memoir, Rust In Peace, chronicled the creation of Megadeth’s acclaimed 1990 album of the same name.
The full interview with Mustaine appears in the next Hammer issue, which will be available to order from Thursday, August 20.
