MEGADETH's Dave Mustaine, whose outspokenness has embroiled him in public spats with other musicians, including members of SLAYER and METALLICA, says that he has been reaching out to some of his former friends and adversaries to rebuild relationships that may have been negatively affected through his past behavior. "We started something about three years ago when I went to 5B Management," Dave told uDiscover Music in a new video interview (see below). "We had talked about doing something called the 'Dave Mustaine charm offensive.' And we're just going out and rekindling old relationships and making sure people who thought that they knew who I was, because they'd only heard about me, get a chance to actually meet me and to repair any of the damage that I may knowingly, or unknowingly, have done. So that really helped a lot." During the same chat, Mustaine said that he was looking forward to completing MEGADETH's next album. The disc will follow 2016's "Dystopia", which debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 chart and earned the band its first Grammy win. "I'm getting very excited to do the next campaign, because we've done all this great work in just one record, one campaign," Mustaine said. "And as we near this next release, my recording contract's up, my publishing contract's up, my merchandise contract's up — I'm a free bird right and I have the world by the short hairs right now. I'm so excited about it too." According to Mustaine, he has "500 riffs" to choose from for MEGADETH's next album, which is tentatively due later in the year. "You can go through there and handpick the best of the best," he said. "And it's not like I have to struggle to come up with something really good. It's there — I just have to pick it. And I'm so excited about doing that and getting something out into the listeners' hands." In a 2016 interview with "Elliot In The Morning", Mustaine said that he wasn't bothered by his reputation as someone who is difficult to deal with. "I don't care about it," he claimed. "I think it's kind of a bummer, though, sometimes when people, for the first time, come up to you. It's such a pregnant pause when people will go… they'll meet you and go, 'God, you know, I heard you were such an a-hole,' and you just kind of look at them, like, 'Uh-huh.' Again, it's like… This reminds me of when I was a kid and my first dance. I went up to a girl and I asked her to dance, and she said 'no,' and I walked away and I thought, 'Screw you! You don't know what you're missing.' And I figured I would commence to destroy her reputation in school. I'm kidding, of course, but that's kind of what we do when we get any kind of rejection; we make the other person out to be really horrible. Evidence of that was when I parted ways with METALLICA. Neither one of us really wanted to tell the absolute truth about what happened; we wanted to make the other party the bad guys. And I think that's what took so long for us to come to the truth that, 'Hey, we still really love each other a lot. And it was never meant to be, but that doesn't mean we can't be friends.'"
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