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MEGADETH‘s final album is out – and that means you can finally hear their left-field version of “Ride The Lightning”.
It’s not left-field in execution – in fact Dave Mustaine’s version at the song he co-wrote while a member of Metallica more than 40 years ago is more polished than the original – but it is a curve-ball as an inclusion on the self-titled opus.
In a statement, Mustaine said: “As I come full circle on the career of a lifetime, the decision to include ‘Ride The Lightning,’ a song I co-wrote with James, Lars, and Cliff, was to pay my respects to where my career first started.”
Expanding on that, Mustaine told the Loudwire Nights radio show: “That was the beginning of my songwriting career.
“I had been learning how to play in the latter part of the seventies, so when the eighties came out, it was only punk rock and disco. And of course there was pop rock … you know, if you wanted to really be heavy, you had to listen to bands like REO Speedwagon.
“And so doing ‘Ride the Lightning,’ it was kind of completing the circle and I think it’s cool in so much as it’s paying my respects to the band that I first went to the dance with.
“I was talking with my management and they said, ‘Why don’t you do ‘Ride the Lightning,’ and I said, ‘Well, then that would be my version of it,’ because I’m not going to do a cover song.
“I’ll play it the way that we played it and I’ll speed it up a little bit and we’ll spice up the drum fills at the end and maybe we’ll spice up the solo and the rhythm section underneath it on top of speeding the song up a little bit.
“Just make it like how when we were doing those demos, there was this, just, fucking aggression. And I think a lot of that was because of our living environments and that we drank more than we ate. It sure was fun, though.”
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