Every band who has become a household name over the years can likely talk to you about a record or two that just didn't come out like they wanted it to. For Dave Mustaine, that record is primarily 1999's Risk. Mustaine says in an interview with uDiscover that 1994's Youthanasia album largely consisted of songs around the 120 beats per minute mark, which the band were told to keep it around in order to generate "hit songs."
He talks a little bit about that, and then dives into Risk, which he says may as well have been titled The Dave Mustaine Project. He also discusses the 2004 remixing of Risk, which alters the tempos of six of the 12 songs on the record. So clearly Mustaine wasn't too stoked on how that came out, or enough at least to change literally half the album five years later.
"This is what happens when you have a production team and somebody has control over the time and different stuff like that that goes along with creating the songs. Because the BPM [beats per minute] for that record… He had said the key to hit songs is everything being in the 120 BPM range. So it wouldn't surprise me if you got a metronome and went and listened to Youthanasia how many songs you would find are in that 120 BPM range. And that's one of the reasons why, when I went back and remixed those and remastered those records, we reset some of those songs back to their original temps, which a lot of them were a little faster. 'Cause the songs felt better, but when you slowed them down, sure, they got a certain heaviness to them, which was awesome, but there was also that speed complex that you have to add into the equation if it's Megadeth music.
Thus the backlash with Risk, because people expected that speed and thrashy kind of stuff. If that record would have been called the Dave Mustaine Project, people would have loved it. But because it said Megadeth, they expected Megadeth. And that was my mistake; I should have called it a solo record. But I had the band guys on there, which would have been totally disrespectful to do that."
Fast forward to present day, and the band doesn't seem to have a problem with going breakneck speeds once more. So I guess there'll be no more producer-influenced albums and the risk of Risk II?
[via Blabbermouth]
