See the choices
Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine was featured in Rolling Stone's "My Life in 15 Songs" section, where a musician chooses 15 songs from their career that defined their life.
Check out Mustaine's choices, and some of the explanations. Read here (in English):
– Ride the Lightning , “Ride the Lightning” (1984): “There are some riffs that you hear and you know who made them. And I'm not just talking about me. There are certain parts on Ride The Lightning and Leper Messiah and the first album, things like that, that you can tell are a bit similar to Megadeth's guitars, because there's a limited number of things you can do with an instrument.”
– Mechanix , “Power Metal” and “No Life 'Til Leather” demos (1982) / “Killing Is My Business… and Business Is Good!” (1985): “The lyrics are about an excited gas station attendant because that's what I was. I was a teenager and girls kept showing up at the station driving these expensive cars in bikinis. Dude, are you kidding me?”
– Last Rites/Loved to Deth , “Killing Is My Business… and Business Is Good!” (1985)
– The Skull Beneath the Skin , “Killing Is My Business… and Business Is Good!” (1985)
– Peace Sells , “Peace Sells… but Who's Buying?” (1986): “I wrote it because I got tired of people making fun of Metal, making fun of Metal fans. It was hard for me to watch the way we were stereotyped on TV, as idiots. Generally, I think a lot of musicians are very intelligent and very talented. It sucks how people are stereotyped.”
– Anarchy in the UK , “So Far, So Good… So What!” (1986)
– In My Darkest Hour , “So Far, So Good… So What!” (1988): “I wrote it when I heard Cliff [Burton] had died. A friend of mine called me to tell me about the accident. And that was very personal for me because I thought, ‘Guys, we’re all brothers in a band and he dies and you have someone else call me?!’ So for me it was very, very bad. I now understand that during grief people do strange things, so I’ve changed my view on it. But at the time I was very upset. I wrote the song in one sitting, and started writing the lyrics as fast as I could. It was a very, very painful period of songwriting.”
– Holy Wars… the Punishment Due , “Rust in Peace” (1990)
– Hangar 18 , “Rust in Peace” (1990)
– Symphony of Destruction , “Countdown to Extinction” (1992)
– Sweating Bullets , “Countdown to Extinction” (1992): “My wife had a crazy friend who had anxiety issues and she went to parties all the time. She’d get in her car and drive away and I’d always get a call from my wife saying, ‘Yeah, she dumped me again,’ and I’d go pick her up. And you’d think it would be the other way around, with a rockstar boyfriend she’d be the one coming to pick me up. So I wrote Sweating Bullets about her friend. I think my wife told her during a fight, so she’d hate me. But I never used her name. I don’t think my wife knows where she is now.”
– She Wolf , “Cryptic Writings” (1997)
– A Secret Place , “Cryptic Writings” (1997)
– Use the Man , “Cryptic Writings” (1997)
– Dystopia , “Dystopia” (2016): “Dystopia is nominated for a Grammy, which made me super happy. People said, 'You have a very limited view of the world. Everything is dystopian for you,' and I was like, no, of course not. But man, I watched 12 Monkeys. I watched 1984. I know it could happen. I played shows on the communist side of the world, in Poland. I saw what happened. I saw the movie about Chernobyl. We've been to Russia right where some of those nuclear plants are. And it's a very dystopian view. You don't need everyone in your neighborhood to die to know what could happen, you just have to look where it already happened. If you go to Detroit, look at some of the cities there, it's very dystopian.”
