MEGADETH's DAVE MUSTAINE: 'We Love Trying To Make Our Music Better'

Lachlan Kanoniuk of TheBrag.com recently conducted an interview with MEGADETH mainman Dave Mustaine. A few excerpts from the chat follow below.

On performing live:

Mustaine: "Before, when we were playing, live performances were a crapshoot. Playing live could have ended up like anything, the way that we played, the way that we partied, the way that we approached our job. Now every day when we go to play, it's so much more different because we're so much more serious about what we're doing as a band. The whole game of playing, and why you do it and how you do it, is so much more serious now. I think that our shows have really stepped up in quality a lot."

On MEGADETH's plans to celebrate "Youthanasia"'s impending 20th anniversary:

Mustaine: "It's kind of hard to say. We'll definitely do something around the anniversary point. Is there going to be a release around it? I don't know. That's up to the label and how things are at the time. We still don't know what the condition of the industry is going to be like in two years from now. Who knows what's going to happen?"

On his thirst for competition:

Mustaine: "Especially with some of the stuff that's happened in my personal life. It's kind of a bummer, my personal life has been made so public that I don't really have a lot of privacy in what I do. But a lot of the things that motivate you to make records are the things that happen in private. I think a lot of people, when they write, they tell the same story over and over again. There are reasons that we do what we do — people think you might be too old and you don't have the fire anymore. I remember hearing stuff like that about many of the bands I looked up to, thinking that's such a horrible thing to say about somebody. They say it about everybody. They say it about me now, about VAN HALEN, about THE [ROLLING] STONES. It's a privilege to be successful enough to hear that. Most of the bands are here today, gone later today. Especially with the hundreds of thousands of bands there are on these social websites."

On the touring life:

Mustaine: "I try and read a lot, I try to eat healthy. When you're in a band you need to get rest when you can, you don't know when you're going to be travelling across time zones. You've got to be able to travel at the drop of a hat. A lot of times for us there has been a show that's popped up on the other side of the world and it's hard to keep your eyes open. That's where it gets tough, the travelling part."

On MEGADETH's plans for the next studio album:

Mustaine: "We've been taking a lot of the information from fan feedback of the last record – [at] listening parties, watched their reaction, checked out comments. If you love playing music, you're gonna answer the question of how you make your music better. Some bands don't give a shit about things like that. But we do. We love trying to make our music better."

Read the entire interview at TheBrag.com.