DAVE MUSTAINE On Recording His Version Of METALLICA's 'Ride The Lightning': 'I Wrote That Song And I Have A Big Claim To It'

In a new interview with Poland's Teraz Rock, Dave Mustaine once again spoke about his decision to include his version of "Ride The Lightning", the title track of METALLICA's 1984 album for which he got a co-writing credit following his 1983 departure from the band, on the final MEGADETH album, simply titled "Megadeth". Regarding why he chose this particular METALLICA song to record, Dave said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "It closed the circle. It paid respect to the band guys. It showed off a couple guitar tricks that I created, like the 'spider chord' and 'grunting'. And it just was a great way to show my respect to the band and to [METALLICA frontman] James [Hetfield] and [METALLICA drummer] Lars [Ulrich] and for their ability. 'Cause I've always thought James was an excellent guitar player. And same thing about Lars — I've always thought he was an excellent songwriter."

Asked if he remembers writing "Ride The Lightning" with METALLICA, Mustaine said: "Yeah, yeah. I had the parts that I had written, and I brought that to them, just like the other songs that I had ideas for. And then James put in his parts. And then the lyrics were his. The lyrics for [other early METALLICA songs] 'Jump In The Fire' and 'Mechanix' were mine. And he changed the lyrics to 'Jump In The Fire' a little bit, and 'Mechanix' got changed to a song called 'The Four Horsemen', which is a different lyric altogether."

When the interviewer noted that MEGADETH's version of "Ride The Lightning" is "very close to the original", Mustaine concurred. "Yeah, it's a little faster," he said. "I sang just a little bit different. James and I have a very unique singing style, but they're also very different. So, I think that's one of the noticeable differences, is my singing style and that we sped it up just a little bit.

"We tried to pay tribute to the parts that were there — the solo, the drums — and do them as close as we felt like it was respectful," Dave explained. "And in some parts, we beefed it up just a little teeny bit. Some of the drum fills at the very, very end are a little bit different from the ones that were on the original."

Asked if the guys from METALLICA have heard his version of "Ride The Lightning", Mustaine said: "I don't know."

Dave also talked about MEGADETH's version of "Ride The Lightning" in the cinematic event "Megadeth: Behind The Mask", which debuted this past Thursday (January 22) on screens worldwide. On the topic of why he chose to record his version of "Ride The Lightning", Mustaine said:  "[It] had nothing to do with a 'gotcha'. It wasn't a payback. In fact, what it was is me healing a big part of myself because… I've made peace with what led up to the decisions that we all were forced into and what caused it and what's happened afterward. It's been successful and great for everybody."

Referencing the fact that he was fired from METALLICA in early 1983 and replaced by Kirk Hammett, Mustaine said: "We were all kids, and we were all severely alcoholics, so I don't think anybody was handling things in an adult manner. And I have absolutely nothing against James or Lars or Kirk [or] Cliff [Burton, late METALLICA bassist]; rest in peace, brother.

"So the idea of doing 'Ride The Lightning' — I wrote that song and I have a big claim to it, and I wanted to finish that," Dave explained. "Now, James wrote the lyrics, clearly. We co-wrote it. But that was a song that, it was one of the last songs that we did together, and I wanted to pay tribute to what we did. 'Cause if you got in a room with me and James and Lars and [early METALLICA bassist] Ron McGovney — I'm 20, these guys are all teenagers — and you say, 'Dave, you're gonna write a guitar style that is gonna be the biggest thing in the fucking world. Do you believe that?' That kid would've said, 'Fuck you.' And I would've said, 'Of course I believe it.' But deep down inside, would I have believed that? I don't think so. I just was doing it because there was a fire in my belly, and I wanted to stop being alone. And I hate loneliness. And that's one of the things that being in a band, I think it helps heal, but you've gotta tread very carefully because you can go into a place where you start to believe your own hype."

"Megadeth" was released on Friday, January 23 via Mustaine's Tradecraft imprint in partnership with Frontiers Label Group's new BLKIIBLK label.

Mustaine co-wrote the song "Ride The Lightning" with Hetfield, Ulrich and Burton.

Mustaine previously spoke about his decision to include his version of "Ride The Lightning" on "Megadeth" in a recent interview with Spain's MariskalRockTV. Dave said:  "Probably 'cause it was the most emblematic of my guitar influence. The spider chord — you know how I do the spider chord. And then there's something called grunting, where I'll hit the chord a half a step below the note I want to go to. I'll fret it and I'll slide into it… It's way heavier. So, to me, I call that grunting. So spider chords and grunting are in 'Ride The Lightning'."

Mustaine continued: "Having written so much of the songs with [METALLICA] — people think I wrote a lot, but on that record ['Ride The Lightning'], it was 'The Call Of Ktulu', which used to be called 'When Hell Freezes Over', and [the title track] 'Ride The Lightning'. And the previous album [METALLICA's 1983 debut, 'Kill 'Em All'] had four songs on it [that I co-wrote]."

Asked if the guitar solo in MEGADETH's version of "Ride The Lightning" is "very close to the original song" because Hammett copied Mustaine's solo from Dave's original version of "Ride The Lightning" with METALLICA, or if Mustaine simply "wanted to respect" Hammett's work by reproducing Hammett's solo from the 1984 album, Dave said: "I think Kirk — if you listen to [METALLICA's 1982] 'No Life 'Til Leather' demo and then you listen to the 'Kill 'Em All' record, it's pretty clear that that Kirk had some instruction [about how to approach the guitar leads on that album]. Was it note for note? No. But it was pretty close. So, when the opportunity came to do 'Ride The Lightning' [with MEGADETH], I didn't really feel like I knew the song very well anymore, and I don't remember what I played on for that song, for 'Ride The Lightning'. I had a hard time finding anything that I played on either. So we just figured, 'Fuck it. [Current MEGADETH guitarist] Teemu [Mäntysaari] and I'll split the solo up, and half of it'll be for him and half of it'll be for me,' and it turned out so that [Teemu] did a little more than half."

Last month, Mustaine told Guitar World magazine about his decision to include his version of "Ride The Lightning" on "Megadeth": "The main reason I chose to do this was to close the circle and pay my respects to my partners. I thought this was a really great way to do that.

"Whenever we select any other band's music to go on our albums, sometimes there's a lot of thought behind it and sometimes there's not. This was one of the ones that we thought long and hard about, because all I wanted to do was play the song I wrote with the guys in METALLICA," Mustaine explained. "I wanted to pay my respects to James Hetfield, who I think is an amazing guitar player, and Lars Ulrich, who was an excellent songwriter. I remember when I was there and we were putting these songs together, Lars didn't just sit there; he was very instrumental in making these songs.

"Of course, when we got into making demos of these songs, it was fun to do the recordings, but we were never really able to do a full-on produced version of 'Ride The Lightning' [while I was in METALLICA], and I would have loved to have heard that.

"I gotta tell you — listening back to James's original vocal performance, it was really tremendous," Dave added.

"Anyway, there's no big strategy; I have respect for the guys, and I just wanted to show that. And it's a hell of a song."

Mustaine also talked about his version of "Ride The Lightning" during an appearance on the December 5, 2025 episode of SiriusXM's "Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk". Dave said at the time: "We're managed by three men — Danny Nozell, Steve Ross and Justis Mustaine. And we were talking with management, and we were just kind of yacking about what the cover song was gonna be on the record, 'cause we always did cover songs on our records. But this wasn't a cover song, because I wrote it with James. And it just became clear that I should do this, because if I'm going to ride off into the sunset, I wanna pay tribute to the band that I started in, and I wanted to make mention about what I think about James."

Mustaine continued: "I think [James is] an exceptional guitar player. I remember the day that I saw him play guitar for the first time. We were playing at the Whisky [A Go Go in West Hollywood, California]. And we had a guitar player with us, and his name was Brad Parker. And the night of the show he changed it to Damian Phillips. And he showed up at the Whisky in mid-1980s Rudy Sarzo garb. And I thought, 'Wow, that's not gonna go down.' And I looked at him and he had a giant feather earring. And I thought to myself, 'This guy's not gonna be here very long.' So I go to rehearsal, after the show, the next rehearsal I go and there's no Brad, there's no Damian, nobody. It was just James playing guitar — like a motherfucker. And I thought, 'How did this happen? How did this guy go from singer to a great guitar player like this?' And I was excited for me. I was excited for the band. And we started playing then."

As for how "Ride The Lightning" was chosen as the song for MEGADETH to record this time around, Mustaine said: "With the track, choosing that, I figured it should be something that I had something to do with, but I didn't know it was going to turn out like that. Something off of 'Kill 'Em All' would've been obvious, and we already did that [with 'Mechanix']. And so I was thinking about 'Ride The Lightning', and there's only a couple songs on there that I wrote. And I didn't think that 'The Call Of Ktulu' would be the right move, 'cause that's not even how the song was when I was in the band; they changed it so much, so it's not the way that I remember it. So we started doing 'Ride', and it just felt so great, listening to the tracks, listening to James's singing, listening to how the song structure was. It was just great. I loved it. And I've always believed when you do a song from somebody, you've gotta do it as good or better — you've got to. So we sped it up a little bit and we beefed up a couple parts, just to make them a little bit more modern. And there you have it."

Mustaine also previously talked about MEGADETH's version of "Ride The Lightning" last October in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. He said at the time: "It wasn't really that I wanted to do my version. I think that we all wanted it to turn out a certain way, and for me, this was about something so much more than how a song turns out. It was about respect."

Speaking specifically about Hetfield, Mustaine added: "No one ever talks to me about that. One day he's a singer, the next day he's this fucking powerhouse and I've always respected him as a guitar player. So I wanted to do something to close the circle on my career right now, since it started off with [Mustaine's band before METALLICA] PANIC and several of the songs that ended up in the METALLICA repertoire, I wanted to do something that I felt would be a good song."

Elaborating on his reasons for recording "Ride The Lightning" for MEGADETH's final album, Mustaine said: "Our intentions were pure. I didn't have any reason I was going to say, 'Oh, hey man, this thing that we've had for 40 years where you guys will never tour with me, me doing the song is going to change things.' That wasn't it at all. It was more about: This is my life going forward. I want to do things that are respectable. And I think doing something where we can pay honor to the guy that … I mean, I hate to say this, because it's just so fucking arrogant, but the guitar playing in METALLICA changed the world."

In a separate video message, Mustaine said: "So on the new album we recorded 'Ride The Lightning', and the reason we did that was, obviously, it's a song that I had a lot to do with writing it. And James and I, when we were working on the song, it became clear to me, when James first started playing guitar, how good of a guitar player he was. And I thought it would be really cool to close the circle to show respect, to play the songs that I've written with METALLICA and to honor our friendship, even though it's been strained and ruined from emotions over the years when we were not necessarily friendly. But one thing I've always had is I've always had a tremendous respect for James's guitar playing andLars's songwriting. So, it was cool to do this and add it to the record. We sped it up just a little teeny bit, and we kind of played around a little bit with the solo and Teemu and I both tossed it back and forth to each other. So, you might hear a little bit of some differences with the tempos and, of course, I sing different from James too. But once again, it was about completing the circle and just showing what James and I, as guitar players, did to change the world."

"Megadeth" track listing:

01. Tipping Point
02. I Don't Care
03. Hey, God?!
04. Let There Be Shred
05. Puppet Parade
06. Another Bad Day
07. Made To Kill
08. Obey The Call
09. I Am War
10. The Last Note
11. Ride The Lightning (bonus track)

Mustaine was a member of METALLICA for less than two years, from 1981 to 1983, before being dismissed and replaced by Hammett.

Mustaine was not inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame with METALLICA during the April 2009 ceremony at Cleveland, Ohio's Public Auditorium. Ulrich later explained to The Plain Dealer that Mustaine "never played on any METALLICA records. No disrespect to him. But there [were] half a dozen other people that were in the lineup in the early days. We thought... the fair thing to do would be to include anybody that played on a METALLICA record." He added: "Dave Mustaine was in the band for eleven months, predominantly in 1982... I'm not trying to play it down. I have nothing but respect and admiration for his accomplishments since."